On days off, Heather, Katie and I would take off for Portobello Road in Notting Hill or go to Camden Lock and spend any spare money we had on vintage clothing and bits of jewellery, beads and crystals from the stalls there. I loved all of it. I felt I had found my place and, with Heather and Katie, my tribe. For my first years, I had four jobs to keep up living expenses. I worked as a receptionist in a health spa in St John’s Wood three days a week, as a photographer’s assistant two days a week for a lovely man, Robin Mayhew, who had a studio in Camden Town. I did bar work in a pub near Highgate five nights a week, and on Saturdays I helped Pete and Marcia out in their shop. On Sundays, I’d go out with my camera, taking pictures of my new world and the people in it. I’d fall into bed each night exhausted but content. I was where I wanted to be because, in my last couple of years in Manchester after college, I’d felt as though I was drifting. I’d done an extra year at college to give myself a teaching qualification but, at the end, I hadn’t applied for any jobs because I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted to do.

A year after my move to London, I’d met Joe at Robin Mayhew’s sixtieth birthday party. Joe was in the kitchen, manning the bar and concocting his famous cocktails for the guests – he always made a mean mojito.

‘And for the lady in the red?’ he asked when he saw me, then began to sing the song so badly that I had to laugh.

‘Just white wine,’ I said.

We spent the rest of the evening chatting, getting very drunk, and although I thought he was flash and bit of a name-dropper, it was hard not to be seduced by his charm and eagerness to please. I learnt that he worked as an art director in advertising, loved his job, and lived in Camden Town; I went back there with him that night and awoke the next morning with a humming hangover. It was a super-trendy maisonette with white walls, black leather sofas, glass and chrome furniture, and Andy Warhol prints on the wall.