I keep telling myself this lodger situation is only for a while, but I don’t know how I’ll ever afford to live in that house on my own. I just probably need to work harder, somehow. I should be a slashy. Journalist/podcaster/politician. How hard can it be to be a politician anyway? They’re all floundering and resigning these days. I can flounder and resign! Especially for cash. I’ll give it some thought when I get some time. I have three lodgers at the moment: Sid, Frances and Moon. They’re all in their early twenties, which makes me feel great. Usually, when I get in, they’re colonising the lounge. The other day when I got in they’d been at an all-day festival at Victoria Park. Swathed across the sofa, bleached and feathered, they looked like a gang of crooked fairies. The evil fairies that kill babies. Those kind of fairies.

Mia comes over. She has a print-out of my column in her hand.

‘Well it’s not going to start the revolution,’ she says. ‘But it might light a few torches in some under-educated backwaters. Now, do you have any candid photos of these days?’

‘I’m sure I can root something out,’ I say.

‘Excellent. Keep it halal.’

I look at my nearest desk-neighbour, confused. My desk-neighbour whispers: ‘She’s trying to make it a thing. Like kosher.’

I nod at Mia. She gives me an empty fist bump and walks away.

I pull out my laptop and start to go through my scanned old photos, but I end up looking at photos of me and Art. I stall over a photo of my mother and Art in a bar. They have their arms around each other. I recall how my mother burst in that night – in stilettos – and shouted (she always shouts, to be fair – no no: she projects): ‘Get me a seat, would you? MY BALLS ARE KILLING ME.’ Everyone in the bar looked – which was what she wanted, of course. Art thought she was the most. Showboats, both of ’em.

‘Your wit’s hers,’ Art said, more than once.

However, one likes to think the apple fell a little further from the wit tree, rolled a good way across the field of wit, coming to rest at the foot of Wit Mountain.

Anyway – she was so nice to him that night. Too nice. She’d never been nice to anyone I’d introduced her to before. But she was all over Art from the get-go. When he went to the Gents, I said: ‘You seem … very eager to please him. Not like you.’

After all, she’d said it countless times: Darling, who needs a man when you have a detached house, a personal trainer and a Teasmade?

‘What do you mean, it’s not like me?’ She did innocent eyes.

I did cynical ones. ‘You’ve always been rude to my boyfriends.’