My birthday that year was my thirty-sixth: an odd one – is it your mid or your late thirties? When you’re a single woman, this distinction matters, to other people at least. I hadn’t been in the practice of making that much fuss about my birthday but there was something about having Matty that legitimised going to a bit more effort, just another of the small benefits that accrue when you’re part of a couple. He had met most of my friends by then, and my workmates. We were established. I couldn’t help recalling all those years I had had to organise a small get-together bravely, on my own, and wake up bravely on my own the next day and think about it to myself. This time, I had someone to go home with afterwards, someone I could say to the next day, did you talk to so-and-so?

I reserved the three tables in the front room of The New Place – not a private room as such, just the area at the front of the bar with a bay window, some very low coffee tables and several sofas – the rest of the bar was a short corridor walk down towards the back of the building. It was around fourteen or fifteen of my friends and colleagues: my Head of Department Adrian came and brought his wife. They were the oldest people there – I hadn’t invited my parents, I would be seeing them separately at the weekend. I’d got a deal, buy three bottles of wine and get a fourth free, so I’d gone for four white and four red, and I’d ordered three platters of deep-fried objects: chicken goujons, sticks of courgette in batter, rings of something white and chewy that might have been onion and might have been squid. They were quite tasty when they were brought out from the kitchen fresh and hot, and disgusting ten minutes later when they had cooled down, after which they lay there on their platters on the low tables waiting for everyone to be drunk enough to eat them anyway. There was also a large blue bowl of mini sausages coated with honey and mustard that were great at any temperature and I ended up eating a dozen of them. When the wine I had bought ran out, other people bought more. By then I was slumped on one of the sofas and letting people pay court to me. It was only a Thursday, but that didn’t seem to be stopping anyone, least of all me.