At 69, I sold my house to travel around the world despite my children’s protests — in Australia, a man invited me to his home for coffee, but when I walked into his living room, I froze.

Where things are.

I did not stay in Australia and I did not marry Alec Hartnoll, which is what everybody who hears forty seconds of this assumes.

I finished the trip. Eleven countries, fourteen months, one suitcase and a bad knee in the April.

I live in a rented flat near Lorraine now, which is a sentence my children find reassuring and that I find completely fine.

Alec and I speak on a Sunday. Sometimes forty minutes, sometimes four. He has been over once, in the June, for three weeks, and stayed with Lorraine and me and met all of them except Yvonne.

He is a friend. We are both too old and too specific to be anything else, and when people wink at me about it I have started saying that out loud, which shuts them up.

And the tin in the storage unit, which I had to ring Lorraine about from eleven thousand miles away at six in the morning her time.