I hit pause and look at his face, my own breathing uneven. It takes me a minute before I am together enough to scroll down. Already over two million people have viewed the videos and new comments appear when I refresh: I never realized how bad the odds were, one says, you’re a miracle.

Others have written their own stories of their rebirths, or when they did CPR on someone who made it, or didn’t.

Another writes simply: Now I know what to do.

I know what I want to do and that’s to call him. But I won’t, because I’m drunk and emotional and I will see things more clearly tomorrow.

Still, I’ve been cooped up in the flat for too long and it’s nearly midnight.

The flat is close to the seafront and I decide that I can make it that far with my crutches. The gin has lessened the pain in my shoulder and foot, but when I step out of the communal door, I feel like Dorothy in the middle of the hurricane. Takeaway cartons dance along the pavement. Even the gulls stay close to the ground, as though they’re scared they too could be swept up and dropped back down in Oz.

More pieces of the West Pier will be lost to the waves tonight and the i360 with its doughnut-shaped platform is closed. But on Hove Lawns, a group of kids play football under the Victorian lamp posts. They have to dodge the debris left by beach huts that haven’t survived the storms.

If I narrow my eyes, I can imagine that one of the players is Joel, though none of them have his elegance or style.

I stand where I stood with Tim on that Millennium Eve and I feel fond of the girl I was, as she waited for the millennium and the life to come.

I saved Joel; he saved me. We’re even-steven.

The childhood phrase makes me laugh. Life can’t be put in columns and the score totted up. Cruelty and suffering come undeserved. We’re at the mercy of the gods, or fate, or plain crappy luck.

The wind blows through me with only the crutches to keep me upright.

I check my watch. Five minutes till midnight. The beach beckons. I get as far as the rusty barriers before I remember pebbles and crutches don’t go together. I look up. The clouds are racing past the stars a few millennia above them.

Two minutes left.

I hear a loud noise and turn as a large piece of beach hut timber skates across the tarmac of the prom.

A boy crosses the Lawns. He’s so like Joel that I catch my breath, my body primed to do what I did eighteen years ago if he falls to the earth again.