The responsibility for Dad’s welfare weighs heavily on me because there is no one to share it with. I am the only child of parents who themselves had no siblings. Dad and I have practically no relations with whom we are in contact, and none at all living in London. He has two elderly female cousins on his mother’s side, living in retirement in Devon and Suffolk respectively, with whom we exchange Christmas cards, and that’s about it. My own children visit their grandfather very occasionally, but they both live at some distance from London and have busy lives of their own. And he has almost no friends. Those he had in the music business are either dead, or he has lost touch with them; and he never had what one would call a social life. Work was his social life, as I knew from the rare glimpses I had of him doing it: swapping jokes on the stand between sets, chatting to customers in a nightclub, always laughing, smiling, shaking hands, because that’s what’s expected of a dance musician, as he explained to me once.
