If it was strange to be sitting at my own kitchen table, albeit with a different cloth on it, and being served food from my own oven I hadn’t cooked myself, that feeling passed quite quickly. Plus, the food and wine helped enormously. Tilly’s Thai green curry was a triumph – and the roulade she’d made to follow, which Josh had just about remembered to defrost, was delicious too. And Francis and Trisha were a delight. They clearly knew Josh extremely well – after all, he’d lived with them when he first came over – but they went back much further than that: Francis and Josh to Cambridge days, which intrigued me, because Francis looked a lot older. They mentioned crowding into a union bar to watch Nelson Mandela being released and I remembered doing exactly the same in my student days, as did Trisha.

‘So we’re all the same vintage,’ she observed, glancing around. Her amused eyes rested on her husband.

‘Yes, all right!’ Francis spluttered, his mouth full of roulade. ‘Ask Josh what he puts in his cornflakes – it’s not my fault the man dyes his hair!’

‘What rubbish!’ Josh roared, eyes popping, face flushed. I was enjoying seeing him like this. We were near the end of the meal and he was a bit pissed, and flustered from doing the cooking. He was also often the butt of his friends’ jokes, and a bit exposed, particularly when Trisha insisted on recalling how she’d first met him. It was bad enough, she told me, leaning across the table, going out with someone from the university when she was only at the secretarial college down the road, but meeting Francis’s friends, especially Josh, had been terrifying. Particularly when he’d asked her whether she thought existential literature was de trop.

‘I didn’t even know what de trop meant, let alone existentialism!’ she shrieked. ‘Was still devouring Jilly Cooper!’

‘Ooh, I didn’t,’ groaned Josh, putting his head in his hands. ‘What an out and out twat. I was probably trying to impress you. Probably jealous of Francis.’

‘What rot, you were escorting that Priscilla number at the time! With the waist-length hair and legs up to the penthouse.’

I reached for my drink. Ah, interesting. He might be my age, but I was seriously punching. Trisha might just as well be describing a supermodel.

‘Priscilla Rivers was a travesty, as well you know,’ Josh retorted. ‘Sorry, Lucy, this is incredibly boring for you. What Trisha is trying to do here is lampoon me with my terrible track record with the female sex. Rather inappropriately, I might add,’ he wagged a jovial finger at her as he raised his glass to his lips.

‘Point taken,’ she demurred, with a grin. ‘Quite fun, though, and somewhat irresistible.’