And I said nine warm fatherly words and a waitress came, and she never raised it again for three years, because a seventeen-year-old gets one attempt and she had spent two months working out how to make it.

And a neighbour came to my fence in the April of 2023 and said something about noise in the house, and I said they’d been doing that since she was thirteen, and picked up a toolbox.

Both of them told me.

Neither of them was able to say it plainly, because people cannot, because saying it plainly is the hardest thing there is.

And I want to be exact about what I am asking for, because people hear this and think I am telling them to interrogate their children, and that is not it and it would not have worked.