The beer tent seems to be a universal icon, and one, to paraphrase a recent acquaintance, about which I may write a short monograph one day. The atmosphere’s always different to a pub or a bar, slightly edgy and hot under the canvas, relaxed and cool outside. You see more undone buttons and exposed podge outside a beer tent than anywhere short of the Flaborama on Boojus 5. I bought a pint of The Admiral’s Old Antisocial at the, thankfully currency-unspecific, bar, and wandered out to the plastic tables.

Now, you may well be thinking: ‘Beer? What a terrible idea. That’s no solution.’ I would reply that you’re wrong. It’s a solution of hops, barley and yeast, and it is so transcendently wonderful that I long ago made the decision to sacrifice any chance of trim thighs in favour of it.

Company is always an issue at this juncture. There’s no point, in my view, in being a solitary drinker. You can do that at home, given a certain degree of sadness which I wouldn’t dream of sinking to. Usually. Well, three out of ten times. And it’s been a difficult time for me lately. Anyway, there were the usual tables of dangerous-looking space pirates, penniless backpackers with their glasses of iced water, and traders waving their hands and complaining that business wasn’t what it once was. Most of them were aliens of some sort.

Therefore, it was with a rather xenophobic sort of glee that I came across a table whose occupants were doubly interesting. They were A: human and B: female.

They looked like they all came from different places, and had clustered together out of the familiar realisation that internal gonads are best, actually. So I sat down and introduced myself. Professor Bernice Summerfield, FRAS (Fairly Rotten At Scrabble), current occupier of the Proxima University Chair Of Archaeology (it’s in my room, by the begonias), holder of the Martian Gallantry Medal (I found one and thought I thoroughly deserved it). They were suitably impressed. They laughed out loud.

‘Jac,’ said a young woman with short hair and interesting earrings. ‘I’m here researching the origins of the market for Ellerycorp. They’re thinking of doing something similar.’ She introduced the others. There was another short-haired woman with the eyes of a Traveller Priestess, who was called Sarah. I don’t think I ever found out why she was there. And there was a feisty-looking woman with tanned olive skin, wearing an assortment of charity shop relics that she somehow made stylish. She was looking at me with a world-weary expression that I found instantly charming, her head propped up on one hand.

‘How’s it going?’ she asked. For a moment I thought of telling her. But no. ‘Fine.’

‘Your round, Lucy,’ Sarah told her, placing her empty glass definitively down on the table.

‘You’re not exactly svelte either,’ Lucy replied, reaching for the glasses and winking.