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Dave Daze, as I would christen years later entries in Diary, mentioned for that night of 1 December 1978 only ‘a nice looking Wendy’. Cookface was struck by my exact, bolder words in the car: ‘I’m going to marry that girl.’

The author’s attempts to make good on his pledge take us through the next four years from that first meeting at two companies’ Christmas parties. Wendy is a separated single mum committed to raising her son and a full-time job in Rugby. David is a single man, committed more to drinking than developing a career in insurance.

This compelling memoir picks up eight years on from The Sunny Side of the House (‘a whirlwind of humour, heartache, and childhood revelations’), which covered David’s East Anglian boyhood to age fifteen. You can take the boy out of the country…

Was the meeting in 1978 pure chance or secret harmony? Degrees of separation occur as David’s job takes him from Northampton to London. Career horizons broaden as far as Africa and South America, but will he pursue them within or without his developing small family unit? Follow this grown-up and growing-up story to see who will be boarding an intercontinental flight in February 1983.