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It seemed poetic to me that an analogue fault would be at the heart of things though, my father being such a resolutely analogue creature himself. An analogue ghost down an analogue wire. Except, of course, there was no ghost. Dr Stanley Quinn had no time for zeros and ones. He trusted in ink and he trusted in paper. He always carried a pen and he never traded his typewriter for a computer, not even when lightweight laptops became something that everybody just had. I remember him telling the Paris Review that he’d ‘never liked the damn things and wasn’t about to start at his age’ (I would read interviews with my father from time to time; they’d sneak into the house amongst the papers and magazine subscriptions, another inky aspect of a man who was never, ever in just the one place).

I rubbed my eyes, drained my glass, and I headed to the kitchen to fix myself another drink.

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By the time I went to bed that night, I felt altogether better about things.

If there’d been anyone around to tell the story of the phone call to, I probably would have done it with a can-you-believe-it smile and a slightly red face. That is, if I’d said anything at all. I definitely wouldn’t be telling Imogen, I decided, not least because I had no interest in a rousing rendition of ‘Cabin Fever’ every time I picked up the phone.