Alfie

The truth was I had thought about it almost constantly since the moment I'd had to move back in, and it was only very partially to do with the laissez-faire approach everyone else in my immediate family seemed to have with cutlery storage.

Mum's house was, like I say, a less-than-ideal living situation for me, and it was not just because I was forced to share a single bathroom with another adult, an almost-adult and a pre-teen.

Mid-morning is a good bet for showers in Mum's house.

Tammy, my littlest sister, has bats in the evenings, mum showers at the crack of dawn, and Grace, in the glory of her late teens, does not usually emerge from her bedroom until early afternoon.

When I first moved back, my old bedroom was full of Christmas decorations, including the artificial tree, still decked out in all its bauble and light glory.

Mum told me her friend Janet had been doing this for years, you just wrap the bastard in a couple of loops of cling film and shove it out of sight.

Janet had a spare room, which mum had never had before, so as soon as the opportunity arose, she ceased it.

She seemed to have also applied the same logic to other occasional-use household items, because my room was also home to the never-used stationary bike, which was dressed in several winter coats, the fully-assembled ironing board, complete with a decorative layer of shirts that had never even heard of an iron, let alone been subject to a pressing by one, a dog's bed filled with dog toys for the dog, Millie, who had died five years previously.

In fairness, Mum had cleared the suitcases off the bed before I arrived, stacking them in a haphazard tower between the bike and the tree and its clingfilm condom.

Will we need to move anything else, she'd asked, and I told her no, because I thought I'd only be there for a few nights at worst.

I'd come back to stay with Mum, because my partner, Ben, who I'd previously been living with, had forgotten to check in with me about when my shift would likely be ending, so he'd failed to kick out the younger, hotter version of me he'd apparently been sleeping with for months before I got home.

Younger, hotter me was a medical student, who was also named Ben, which I found a particularly kick in the teeth.

It wasn't that he was called Ben, which was my partner's name too, or even that he was younger and unquestionably more attractive than I was.

It was that he was a medical student.

My Ben had started sleeping with me when I was a trainee nurse.

I remember the night I left for my mum's house, right before I walked out the door, I looked at them, sat together on the couch that my Ben and I had bought together, and asking, dazed, if they said each other's names during sex, because wasn't that weird, saying your own name?

They both just looked at me with the same mix of horror and embarrassment they'd been regarding me with since I'd walked into the bedroom and my Ben had his pelvis nestled against the other Ben's arse cheeks.

I've since come to the conclusion that they absolutely did because my Ben refused to answer this question no matter how many times I put it to him.

I trudged across York on foot because the car was broken with my rucksack and my phone and I was still crying when Mum opened the door to me.

She made me a cup of tea, finished moving the suitcases and put me to bed.