“Everything is laminated with the oily film of spillages.”

MY CAR is parked, hazards on, up on the kerb in Cork.

For the past 15 minutes, I’ve been emptying its contents onto the pavement outside my daughter’s first year in college student house. While she opens the front door, I grab a box of her belongings and look up.

The façade is denuded of the kind of decorative features that normally suggest ordinary human habitation; it’s unloved and dismal.