Rose had the satisfaction of knowing that she knew all of this first, having seen Danny’s slides. She felt distinctly proprietary towards the centre and its work. If the changes made her nervous in a way she couldn’t shake, they also brought an undeniable sense of energy and momentum. Splashing out, she ordered herself a new pair of wellies she had been eyeing, a proper pair, not cheap, an early birthday present to herself.

There was a lot of media interest. Danny did well on the radio and in a Guardian interview. His unaffected style made him a good speaker; he always sounded very candid.

When Rose caught the tail end of a story on the BBC the next morning, she marvelled at how far they had come. What were the odds of the two of them ending up where they were, working together, no less? And for a split second – a nanosecond – she felt almost proud of them.

It was Danny who had told her she was a hedgehog. Where were they when he said it? Sitting by the river, inconspicuous, a couple of kids, that was the idea. His rucksack held the binoculars, hers had her tutorial paper in it, wedged in with a couple of books.

Isaiah Berlin had written that hedgehogs approach the world with a single, all-embracing idea, whereas foxes are fascinated by the infinite variety of things.

‘And what variety there is!’ said Danny, grinning.

She remembered the rowers on the river, the cox calling something. It was late spring or early summer, what should have been a time of possibility and promise. Evening. Or the gloaming, if you wanted to be fancy about it.

She remembered the way he looked then. Longer-haired. Full-cheeked. He was visiting Oxford, down for a couple of days. She knew him not from uni but from a demo in Manchester – or really, the demo afterparty back at Garrett’s house. They had both helped out with the guerrilla projection of footage onto the shopping centre wall, then put on masks and walked about handing out leaflets.

That was a world away from Oxford, as Danny remarked on the riverbank. He was studying at Manchester but liked to play the working man. Very faintly they could hear the bells tolling in town. As they lay by the gentle river, he snatched and read her paper. She focused at the time on the fact that he called her a hedgehog, which she took to be a slight. It was not very flattering, to say the least. But perhaps she should have heeded the other thing he said, about him being a fox.