He’d been sick for a while, but then suddenly he was gone and the funeral was the first time I began to accept this. Mum and I had learned to cope since then, but we still thought about him all the time. We liked to remember the happy times, how he’d always made us laugh… and the way he used to sing along really badly to the radio.

The caravan was a poor replacement for our suburban terraced house, but Mum had assured me that soon we would have a beautifully refurbished cottage, a home unblemished by memories, a fresh start. I missed Dublin so much that I couldn’t really appreciate this. I was still coming to terms with the fact that I would have to move to a new school in September, make new friends, find a new band, basically rebuild all these vital parts of my life. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to that. I was looking forward to moving into the house though. The caravan was unbelievably cramped, which didn’t make things easy between me and Mum when we both needed our own space.

I’d thought living in a caravan would be great fun, kind of like living on a tour bus. And it had been fun… for about ten minutes. Mum had rented it online and somehow it looked massive in the images, but in reality it was more like one from an episode of Father Ted – except nobody was laughing when it was delivered and we saw how tiny it was. My head almost reached the roof, and I’m only five foot five. At one end there were two single couch beds with some very compact storage space underneath, and there was a table in between them that you could have either up or down. At the other end of the caravan there was a counter top with a hob and a kettle and two cupboards underneath. And in the middle, beside the tiny space that joined the ‘bedroom and kitchen’ (as the website had put it), was an even tinier bathroom. My bed was the most uncomfortable thing on the planet and I dreaded getting into it.