As I walked, I thought of our early twenties. We’d spent them putting the world to rights over cocktails of Żubrówka and apple juice at bars that used to be handbag factories, or in bedsits over mugs of herbal tea, the same freewheeling conversation that continued for years, it seemed, lightly spanning the places we and our other friends variously sojourned, internships, relationships, the occasional Alpha course. Brussels, Paris, London, New York: big cities with bright lights, flatshares and failed love affairs and flea markets on Sundays. We’d thought we were living the dream, and if we were unhappy, well, it was our fault, our failure to live up to it all.

Once, at a bonfire party, we’d talked late into the night, long after the others had gone, moving our chairs now and then towards the warmth. At one point we’d looked down to realise the embers were smouldering around us. It had 46seemed, at the time, a metaphor for something.

I took my phone from my pocket and swiped it. Do you remember the bonfire? I texted, still walking.

Her message flashed back before I’d even suffixed some flames.

There’ll soon be less distance, it said, between our babies and us-then, than us-then and us-now.

It took me a moment to get my head around it.

I sent back the smiling-crying face and the Edvard Munch.

On a whim, in the aisles of the Costcutter, I bundled the necessary packets and tins into my basket, and when I got home I made Fifteens.

They were called Fifteens because you needed fifteen of everything. Fifteen digestive biscuits, fifteen marshmallows, fifteen glacé cherries – the stickiest, most artificial, reddest sort. You bashed the digestives with a rolling pin, halved the cherries and marshmallows, mixed up the whole lot with a tin of condensed milk, then rolled it into a sausage and shook over desiccated coconut. You didn’t even need to cook it, just chill it for a bit. It was a ridiculous recipe, and one that could only come from a place where grown men and women would, with a perfectly straight face, order a square of Lumpy Bumpy to have alongside their pot of tea. A place whose facade was allowed, or needed, to slip just that much, no more.

We had made Fifteens in primary school – everyone made them in primary school – and I still remembered the 47stout headmistress sliding her finger around the inside of the tin of Carnation condensed milk and shivering, rolling her eyes with pleasure.