Marlon scowled darkly. At five, he wanted any game he loved to go on and on and on, preferably forever.

Tara placed her fingertip on the dimple on his right cheek.

‘I’m going to kiss you right there,’ she said.

A reluctant smile. He was such a sweet, gentle boy. He shyly placed a fingertip on his mum’s undimpled face.

‘And I’m going to kiss you right there.’

I took The Rough Guide to Tokyo from Tara’s suitcase and sat down on the bed. There was a young white-faced woman in a kimono on the cover. I turned the pages, and Tokyo looked like a city that had absolutely nothing to do with today. It looked like a place that lived in the future and the past all at once.

‘There’s a bar in Tokyo that only plays Led Zeppelin on vinyl,’ I read. ‘And only serves red wine. And only one kind of pasta.’

‘I’m not going to have any time for bars.’

‘Shake, Buddy,’ Marlon said. ‘Shake hands, boy.’

The dog grinned at him.

Marlon grabbed his front right paw and shook it.

‘That dog still needs his evening toilet break,’ Tara told me. ‘And you, young man, need to brush your teeth and head for bed.’

So I walked Buddy around the block, our quiet corner of Camden Town already turned in for the night, Buddy patiently checking the lampposts and the recycling bins and the bushes for the stories that lived in the splashes of a hundred dogs, a thousand dogs, for all dogs live in a world of scent.

Buddy finally did his business and I lavished praise on his handsome yellow head as I crouched with a poo bag. When we got home I set him free and collected the chilled glasses from the freezer and the Prosecco from the fridge.

Marlon had hung a new artwork on the fridge door. My Family, it was called. He had left his stick people phase behind him, like Picasso moving on from cubism, and the limbs of his figures were far rounder now, their lines softer, as if the subjects were made out of cartoon sausages. A woman – her hair an explosion of yellow scribble – holding a black briefcase was being waved off by a man in thick black glasses and a child with a dog at his feet. Who could that be? The tall go-getting, world-conquering mummy and the myopic brown-haired (OK, mousey) stay-at-home daddy holding the hand of a little boy with a dog glued to his side, the kid’s mop of blond hair exactly the same shade of melted butter as his knockout mother’s crowning glory.

That’s us. That’s our family.

I smiled at the drawing and then carried the bottle and the glasses to the bedroom.

Tara was sitting up in bed in her T-shirt and pants, Marlon sleeping soundly by her side. She grinned ruefully.

Sometimes a bottle of Prosecco doesn’t mean a date night. Sometimes it is only a bottle of Prosecco.