I have to take control of the situation. Maybe it’s a test! John is just being a little bit…old school. I’m not an idiot, I know that The Gentleman is not exactly marketed as a crucial feminist text. But it’s an iconic title and working for them would mean forcing myself to get used to this. Whatever this is.

John’s got to be closer to fifty than forty, but he’s not the urbane, sophisticated media star I believed him to be. He’s more like a twelve-year-old boy, convinced the best day of his life is the one when he almost saw a single nipple.

If I don’t rise to it, I can get this back on track. It’s so weird here. I imagine sitting at a desk in a room as elegant as this one, with its gleaming, dark wooden table, the soft, Scotch Mist blues warmed by bronze lamplight. And in the middle of it all, John, poking my forearm, showing me a scribbled picture of a spurting penis, or getting hold of an old-fashioned Casio calculator just so he can write BOOBIES upside down.

I try to smile, drawing on my final reserves of nerve. ‘We can definitely talk about content that’s a little closer to what we’re doing at The Know, although I think my tone there is very different. I’d love to hear your thoughts about what your readers are looking for. One thing that consistently performs well for us is our sex toy pieces. That sits really well with our demographic, but maybe there’s a way of covering it for an olde— I mean, slightly more mature male audience? And the advertising potential is huge, of course!’

That was magnificent. I wish I had a microphone, so I could drop it hard onto the polished tabletop. Advertising potential! Tone! Demographic! I actually sounded like a grown-up.

John strokes a tusk, I mean, his nose. He breathes in, he breathes out. He rattles. Is he dying? Is he about to tell me that he will bequeath me a column as long as I respect his final wish and spend the night at a haunted house?

‘And have you, ah, um, have you had any more threesomes lately?’

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Did Harri put them up to this? I’m genuinely starting to wonder whether this is a prank, and she’s about to jump out from behind a potted plant and say ‘Ahahahaha! Caught you! I knew you didn’t have a stomach bug!’