If you were here last week, you’ll remember that on a cold January night in 1945 my inebriated father came close to undoing all of this before it began, jeopardising not only his betrothed’s love before they were married and, with it, the family they would eventually engender – my brother, my two sisters, myself, the five Mooneys we in turn brought into the world – but also the very existence of Hexagon itself, and its thousands of subscribers, each of whom, more and more I fear, wholly depends on it for whatever clarity and connection they still might find in this life.

For those who missed last week’s letter, here’s what happened: When the taxi pulled away and left Wilf on the curb, he sobered up just long enough to understand that something had snapped. One moment, he’d been the life of the hotel room, tipping back straight rye on an empty stomach to impress Rimmer, Knobby and Shag; the next, he was a staggering fool offering his fiancée ten dollars like hush money for a night he’d already ruined. He remembered only fragments – the fluorescent glare of the drugstore, the near-full bottle of Canadian Club arcing into a trash can, the blurred stumble to my not-yet-mother’s boardinghouse, only to be met by Mrs A’s calm face at the door as she told him he had better go home.

Later, the boys would fill in the rest: his return to the hotel, wild‑eyed and determined to drink himself into oblivion. By morning, he’d cast himself as the injured party, furious at being dropped from the cab and turned away from the house, until Christine, with clinical precision, described how he’d humiliated Hélène in front of everyone. Standing there, stomach churning, he realised that a few hours of drunken bravado had cost him more than any hangover ever had, and for the first time it occurred to him that if alcohol could turn him into the kind of man a woman had to escape from, he either had to give it up – or accept that this version of himself was the only one anyone would ever remember.

You’ll have to wait a week to find out what happened next. No, scrap that. Unless at least ten of you pony up, you’ll never hear another word from Wilf, and will have to make do instead with bowl after bowl of my plopping‑porridge prose, ladled over your brain every Sunday till every orifice in your body weeps mush.