My parents, sisters and I travelled in our pyjamas to Dryburgh Abbey for my father’s last hurrah.

On the way back home we stopped off in Corbridge. Here we called in on my grandmother’s house (which had not been knocked down and replaced by an old people’s home in the late 1980s, after all).

I ran up the stairs past the print of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire, then tried all the doors on the first floor. Although they were all locked, I could see inside my grandparents’ bedroom, and noticed the familiar brown and orange bedspreads from the room that I shared with my sisters when we were children. Through another door I could hear the voices of JMH’s friends. Someone was insisting that media lawyers were the best to engage in a divorce case.

All I wanted to do was to check the furniture in each of the rooms. Where were the dressing table, wardrobe and chest of drawers from Redmires?