As a kid, dad told me, you can’t just wait for things to happen. You’ve got to make them happen. The fact this conversation took place at night, in the bed we shared for 2 years from 1987 to 1989, meant I wasn’t really open to any positive messages. When you’re sharing a bed with your dad, positive thinking doesn’t work.

When I once grumbled about sharing a bed with Dad, he told me I should thank my lucky stars he wasn’t a nonce. “If this was happening in some third world country, you’d probably get touched up”.

When I got my fold up bed in September ’89 (a pivotal month when I also bought our first VHS recorder – the landline would arrive a year later) and moved out of the marital bed we’d been sharing, dad’s initial fear was that mum would seize the opportunity and step back in to fill the vacancy. He told me that by leaving the marital bed, I’d now put loads of pressure on him to save his marriage.

Fearing mum would move over from the lower bunk prompted dad to finally make his move and asked for a divorce. Mum got to keep the kids and she didn’t fight him for the 12ft coat rail he’d bought in a bid to utilise space in our bedsit.

The coat rail experiment never worked. Dad said we weren’t open to the idea. Open to what though? Turning the bedsit into a cloakroom? Years later, not long after mum had passed, Dad turned to me and said, “You know Son, we missed an opportunity there with that coat rail. If you guys had been more receptive, we could really have turned things around, made home a great place to be. That rail came with a sprung locating height adjustment but you guys just didn’t want to know.”