Mr Parker was thirty-ish, single, had damp hands, and palpitated with nerves behind his glasses whenever he spoke to me. He lived with his mother and was the art teacher. Nevertheless, at an all-girls school, where even the Very Average Gardener became The Fit Gardener, collective breath steaming up windows as he pruned the roses, and then, in a leap of hormones, The Really Fit Gardener, Mr Parker was often up for discussion. Not just amongst the girls, either, but also in the predominantly female staff room where the only other male teachers were over fifty. I'd play to the gallery on the phone to Hugo.

"He let me wash his brushes yesterday. And tomorrow we're getting messy with clay. But there's only one wheel, so I'm thinking Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore?"

“Definitely. And you should sleep with him afterwards. Demi would."

"I should, shouldn't I? Can't think why I haven't already. Got your grouse moor sorted yet?"

"Coming along nicely, thanks. Bubbles seems to have one in Scotland and Millie's family have one in Yorkshire. Both eminently marriageable. I'm wracked with indecision."

"Yorkshire's a bit gritty," I told him. "I'm not sure I can see you there with all that muck and brass. You're a bit too sensitive."

"You're right. And I've always rather hankered for a kilt. As you know, I've got great legs. Bubbles it is."

I'd spend the rest of the day in a flushed, smiley, post-flirtatious haze after our chats, and even though our university choices were equally insane, geographically speaking, his being Oxford and mine the School of Art in Glasgow, we stayed the course.

He loved coming up to Glasgow — he flew, of course, having more of an allowance than I did — and I could tell that, despite already being well travelled, something about the muscular architecture, the tough, seemingly terrifying and incomprehensible but hilarious locals, the poverty, but also the hard graft, spoke to him in a way that the deliberately sheltered part of India he'd been exposed to, the luxury of the mountains and the gentle, rural nature of our joint childhoods, hadn't. He liked nothing more than drinking in the pub above which I lived with three other students, and where the tough Glaswegians finishing their shifts at the dock would sink pints amongst the outrageously flamboyant art students. It was an eclectic mix and even Shona, who was pretty unshakeable, found it eye-poppingly odd when she came to stay one weekend.

"OK, don't look now," she murmured into her lager. "But that one at the bar with the eye make-up is so obviously gay, but he's kissing a girl. Hugo, I said don't look."