On Father’s Day my millionaire son walked into my freezing apartment, saw the tinned soup on the table, and asked how I was managing on the eight thousand a month his wife sends me. I told him nobody sends me anything.

He did not visit. That is his and it is real and it is not nothing.

But he asked. And the reason that question had stopped meaning anything by about 2023 is that I had trained him, for a hundred and fifty weeks, to expect the same two words.

You can teach a person that a question is only a formality.

It does not take long. About a year. Fifty-two identical answers and the question stops being a question and becomes a greeting.

I did that to my own son, on purpose, by being pleasant.

It has been eleven weeks since Father’s Day.

I have moved.

Not into a senior residence. Into a flat four streets from my son’s house with a radiator that works and a window that faces the right way.