I’d promised my daughter a Michelin star meal before either of us knew how that actually works in real life.

“You cook like this,” I told her once in our tiny English kitchen, “you deserve to see how the professionals play.”

So when she came to visit for a few days, I booked Stoke Mill near Norwich. Proper star, tasting menu, all the grown-up theatre.

I was working as a live-in carer on the Norfolk coast, in one of those quiet English corners where the sea is grey, the wind is steady and nothing dramatic is supposed to happen.

My client loved car rides. She barely walked, but the car was still her way of touching the world. So we would drive: through villages, along hedges, to the sea and back again. Sometimes we’d sit on a clifftop car park and just watch the water from inside the car, the heater humming steadily in the background.

I’d heard flamenco before. On recordings. In the background.

To me it sounded like squeaks and tension – not “passion and fire”. Interesting, but not my frequency.

I had an evening to myself and I decided that a live show plus a good dinner would be the test

I was sixteen, just after my second year of high school.

My best friend had just returned from two-week holiday by the sea with her parents and brought a souvenir: she’d fallen madly in love with the fitness instructor from the holiday resort.

To her mind there was only one logical next step: we had to go and visit him.

The suitcases were still closed.

The flat still smelled like other people’s holidays – layers of perfume, sunscreen, something fried. For years I’d rented it out to strangers, and now I’d finally arrived with the crazy idea that it could be my home.

It started as a very reasonable idea. I was living in England, surrounded by old houses, charity shops and the quiet arrogance of history. Somewhere in one of my client’s homes I’d seen the perfect letter opener: elegant, heavy, a tiny piece of daily ritual that made opening bills look almost dignified. I wanted one of my own.