"The day Richard’s death announcement appeared in theManchester Evening Chronicle, I knew I couldn’t postpone clearing up the mess any longer. But there was something I had to do first. I stood in the doorway of the living room of the man who’d been my lover for three years, Polaroid in hand, surveying the chaos. Slowly, I swept the camera lens round the room, carefully recording every detail of the shambles, section by section. This was one time I wasn’t prepared to rely on memory. Richard might be gone, but that didn’t mean I was going to take any unnecessary risks. Private eyes who do that have as much chance of collecting their pensions as a Robert Maxwell employee. Once I had a complete chronicle of exactly how things had been left in the room that was a mirror image of my own bungalow next door, I started my mammoth task. First, I sorted things into piles: books, magazines, CDs, tapes, promo videos, the detritus of a rock journalist’s life. Then I arranged them. Books, alphabetically, on the shelf unit. CDs ditto. The tapes I stacked in the storage unit Richard had bought for the purpose one Sunday when I’d managed to drag him round Ikea, the 1990s equivalent of buying an engagement ring. I’d even put the cabinet together for him, but he’d never got into the habit of using it, preferring the haphazard stacks and heaps strewn all over the floor. I buried the surge of emotion that came with the memory and carried on doggedly. The magazines I shoved out of sight in the conservatory that runs along the back of both our houses, linking them together more firmly than we’d ever been prepared to do in any formal sense with our lives."