When I overhear Daff speaking to her female friends I’m always amazed at the sheer range of topics they cover. They can get from small talk to deep-and-meaningful within seconds. Whereas when I went on holiday last year with Harv and a couple of other mates, we spent all four days testing each other’s knowledge of football and films and nineties hip hop. I’m not complaining; it was brilliant. I guess women see their friends as profound, complex human beings, while men see theirs as walking quiz machines.

Still, I’m half a pint of Guinness down and Harv has paused to look at his phone, so I decide to give it a go.

‘Yeah, thing is, actually, Harv, I’m sort of feeling a bit … down at the moment, mate.’

He looks up at me. For some reason – possibly to cushion its emotional bluntness – I’ve delivered this statement in a comedy Scouse accent. I have never even been to Liverpool.

‘Ah, don’t be down, mate,’ Harv says, mimicking my Steven Gerrard twang.

‘Well … I am a bit,’ I reply, still inexplicably Liverpudlian.

‘Ah, mate …’ He sips his drink. ‘Don’t be.’

This isn’t really going anywhere. This is just two men having the world’s dullest conversation in an accent neither of them can pull off.

But I suddenly, desperately, want to find a way to actually talk to him. Because it’s too much, keeping all this stuff locked up in my head. It feels like a dam is about to burst somewhere inside me, and fifteen years’ worth of suppressed emotions are about to stream out onto the table between us.

I’m mentally scrambling about for a decent inroad to this outpouring when Harv smirks and shoves his phone in my face.

‘Look at this … Honestly, Mourinho is such a dick.’

I scan the news story, in which Mourinho does, to be fair, come off quite dickishly. Harv slips his phone back into his pocket and grins. ‘OK, random one: d’you reckon, off the top of our heads, we could name every World Cup winner from 1930 on?’

I stamp a smile across my face, and manage to shove down all the sadness and guilt and grief that was about to come spilling out of my mouth. ‘I reckon we could give it a go,’ I say.

He thumps the table. ‘Right. I’ll get another round in first. Although technically, it’s your turn …’

I hand him a tenner and watch as he squeezes through the crowd towards the bar.

And that’s when I hear a gravelly chuckle from over my shoulder: ‘Unlucky there, my friend. You were so close …’

Chapter Three

I turn around to see that the scraggly-bearded Rolex salesman is now sitting in the booth behind us.