Winnie shrugs. ‘Well, either way it doesn’t really matter. I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility of Mrs Prince and just roll with it regardless.’

With that small hurdle workshopped, we return to the tasks at hand.

My room takes ages to clean. It will be a tight race to get to the shops before closing at this rate. The food is our next challenge. Winnie has wasted her entire day at work poring over every cookbook. She is capable of culinary genius, she assures me, but due to time pressures the only sensible thing to do is go and buy everything preprepared from a gourmet food hall and let the VIP guests think that we’ve made it ourselves.

‘You doing anything fun tonight, Doc?’ my patient asks me the next afternoon as I explain that his fractured scaphoid bone means he needs a cast on his wrist if he’s to avoid avascular necrosis (bone death, in layman’s terms). ‘You look like a girl who knows how to have fun.’

The patient is a young flight attendant who fell over in the middle of a gay orgy while high on MDMA last night. Not only did he sustain a fracture, but I also had to remove a buttplug that had been jammed in a little too high (miraculously I was able to tease it out with forceps and he didn’t need an operation), so I allow the overfamiliarity.

‘Not quite as fun as what you got up to last night,’ I say, grinning and taking him into the plaster room. ‘But now that you ask …’ I explain my plans for the evening.

‘God, so you’re just having all these sexy old surgeons over for dinner,’ he says, looking thrilled. ‘What are you cooking?’

‘I’m not,’ I admit freely. ‘We’ve bought everything from a food hall and I’m pretending we made it.’

His cackles set me off, and we sit in the plaster room giggling as I apply sheet after sheet of plaster of Paris. Vincent is actually pretty helpful, and gives me plenty of advice on serving prawns and transitioning between courses.

‘It’ll be great, gorgeous,’ he says supportively as I farewell him at the doors of the emergency department. ‘They won’t be able to believe how well you’ve catered. I can’t believe you’re having five courses! Don’t let them know the menu in advance, just keep bringing out course after course, and surprising them.’ It’s not till I’m on my way to Coles to purchase some napkins at the end of my shift that I start to feel nervous. I’ve been so excited that I haven’t really paused to consider the enormity of the situation. My boss, to whom I am sexually attracted, is coming over to my place for dinner along with two of the best surgeons in the world.