Fiona keeps expecting me to help because I am her sister. She passes with an armful of plates and shoots me a dark look. Then she remembers that I am a guest and offers me some Chardonnay.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, I’d love some, thanks,’ and we chat like grown-ups. The glass she fills me is the size of a swimming pool.

It makes me want to cry to think of it. It must have been 2002. There I was, just back from three weeks in Australia and mad – just mad – into Chardonnay. My niece Megan must have been four, my nephew nearly two: fantastic, messy little items, who look at me like they are waiting for the joke. They have friends in, too. It’s hard to tell how many kids there are, running around the place – I think they are being cloned in the downstairs bathroom. A woman goes in there with one toddler and she always comes out fussing over two.

I sit beside the glass wall between the kitchen and garden – it really is a lovely house – and I watch my sister’s life. The mothers hover round the table where the kids’ food is set, while, out in the open air, the men sip their drinks and glance skywards, as though for rain. I end up talking to a woman who is sitting beside a plate of chocolate Rice Krispie cakes and working her way through them in a forgetful sort of way. They have mini-marshmallows on top. She goes to pop one in her mouth, then she pulls back in surprise.

‘Ooh, pink!’ she says.

I don’t know what I was waiting for. My boyfriend, Conor, must have been dropping someone off or picking them up – I can’t remember why he wasn’t back. He would have been driving. He usually drove, so I could have a few drinks. Which was one of the good things about Conor, I have to say. These days, it’s me who drives. Though that is an improvement, too.

And I don’t know why I remember the chocolate Rice Krispies, except that ‘Ooh, pink!’ seemed like the funniest thing I had ever heard, and we ended up weak with laughter, myself and this nameless neighbour of my sister’s – she, in particular, so crippled by mirth you couldn’t tell if it was appendicitis or hilarity had her bent over.