I flew home to tell my daughter off for wasting the money I’d been sending for five years. I found her at school eating half a bread roll — and then the counsellor told me she’d been registered as a low-income student since the year I left.

I had not gone anywhere. I was at home. I had been at home every night that week.

I sat in a records office and read that date about eleven times and then I went outside and sat on a wall.

Because it is not opportunism. That is what I had been telling myself for eleven days — that a difficult situation had arisen and two people had taken advantage of it badly.

A form dated eleven weeks before the flight is not taking advantage of something.

It is a plan that was already running while I was still in the room.

And then there is the job.

I did not find that job. I was not in any state to find a job in the March of that year — I could not open post, and there is a period of about six weeks after my wife’s service that I genuinely cannot account for.