I want to describe what was happening in me while I did it, because it was not what I thought it was.

I thought it was pride.

I have since had a long time to look at it and it was relief.

Because for ninety seconds in a bedroom I had been constructing a thirteen-year-old boy who had sold a guitar for drugs, or for a phone, or for a girl, or for nothing, and what I got instead was a boy who had sold a guitar for a wheelchair, and the gap between those two is so enormous that the relief came out of me as warmth and the warmth felt exactly like pride and I could not tell the difference and did not try.

So I held onto him and said something I have had quoted back to me by three separate people, because it got into the version that went round.