My father has taken up his crusade to save The Couch. It is not all that dissimilar to the crusade of last year. He is adopting very similar techniques; once again he has martyred himself to the cause of A Clean Surface. Please, he says hoarsely when I get home, flagging, my sun burnt shoulders little beacons of red warning light in an ocean of pale skin, please… and waves almost hopelessly in the direction of a spotless Couch. I admit to him that the burnt sienna pattern comes as a nice surprise.

So it should, he says weakly, this took me all day. He clutches his back and hobbles to the kitchen drawer in search of paracetamol. The entire kitchen unit collapses with a wooden crunch onto his left foot.

SCHEISS VERDAMMTER MIST, he screams. He is a mere crispy, frazzled shell of his former self. German swearing is a tell-tale sign of last-strawdom. I realise at this point that the existence of The Couch (once a dumping ground, always a dumping ground) is a very real, very tangible, very dust-free threat to his precarious sanity.

So I am not surprised that when Chrisie appears at the foot of the staircase looking forlorn, hamster cage cradled in her arms, he leaps onto The Couch and stands with his arms outstretched and knees slightly bent. He reminds me of Dave The Mad Gym Instructor standing on his wooden milk crate, about to embark on a vigorous set of thigh squats. Oh no, he says, no no no. He shakes his head and smiles grimly, the grin of a man on a merciless mission. No THINGS. Absolutely no THINGS.

But they’re hot up there, she wails, and indeed, they lie panting heavily on their furry backs, taking turns at feebly lifting their heads up to the water bottle. She ducks under an outstretched arm, anyway, they’re not THINGS! They have a NAME! Fatty One and Fatty Two became The Fatties, and in their old age have become indistinguishable and ugly. The inevitable tussle ends badly, with my father lying spread-eagle and limbs akimbo in a heap of sawdust and nibble-sized chunks of old toilet paper rolls. I have to laugh, for a long, long time.

So it goes that we humour Couch Militancy. In my father’s presence, Len drops to his knees with a magnifying glass and picks laboriously specks of dust from The Couch with a pair of tweezers. I recreate the complex creative geography of my revision notes (almost a masterpiece, with its subtle multi-layering and cross-referencing) on the living room carpet. The Fatties, when my father is home, are banished to the cold cellar where they squeak sadly into the darkness, and Mami’s sock-sorting activities no longer take place on The Couch (no longer take place, full stop).

Fingers crossed, this is temporary regression.