Rotating to bring Alex into frame, Rhys gave a nod. “Go on, then, this’ll be great”—he made air quotes with his one free hand—“‘con-tent,’ as we influencers call it.”

Alex smoothed out his hair and did his best to look streamable. “Right, so there’s this bus conductor who’s rather bad at his job, and a judge sentences him to be executed.”

“That seems a bit of an overreaction.” Rhys turned his attention back to his phone. “You see, folks, that’s the problem with the criminal justice system. The rich and the powerful, well, they can get away with anything. But ordinary people like you and me and this bus conductor, it’s different rules for us, isn’t it?”

If I’d been smart about it, I could’ve ducked out while they were distracting each other. I wasn’t smart about it. “It’s just a joke, Rhys.”

“It may be a joke, but it highlights a very real sociopolitical inequality.”

He had a point. “In the original version of the joke, he has legitimately killed somebody.”

“But has he, though?” asked Rhys Jones Bowen, looking grave. “Or was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time? You see it’s very easy, Luc, for you to sit there in your comfortable office and judge a man, but stories like this happen every day. An ordinary bus conductor is going about his business, and the years of abuse from an unfeeling public and the exploitative conditions he’s been forced into by a privatised system of public transport…”

“Steady on.” Alex had suddenly taken an interest. “I know a lot of chaps who did terribly well out of privatisation. Picked up some absolute bargains, making themselves simply pots of money now. And they’re all jolly nice fellows.”

Oh God, what had I done. A simple pun about a slightly obsolete public-sector job had turned into a debate about the long-term impacts of Thatcherism. “You see it’s all right for them,” Rhys was saying. “But you can’t have one without the other, can you? For every one of your friends getting rich off the proceeds of crony capitalism, there’s a poor bus conductor out there, just trying to get by, accidentally killing a passenger because he’s had to work a triple shift because his daughter needs heart surgery and the NHS doesn’t have any free beds and—”

“Should I…” I asked helplessly. “Should I have told the one that goes ‘What’s brown and sticky?’”

“What is brown and sticky?” asked Alex.

I gave him an apologetic smile. “A stick.”

“True.” Alex gave an approving not. “Yes, you should have told that one. It would have been less likely to get political.”