‘Good morning, Bob,’ Dalmar responds politely, remembering how when he first came to the UK and he heard men calling each other mate all the time, he thought huge numbers of British men were called Mike.

‘Off home?’ says Bob, although as Dalmar is leaving a night shift, it’s highly unlikely he’s going anywhere else. This is something else Dalmar has had to get used to, the way the British love asking questions when the answer is already known or not needed. He has grown fond of the habit in some ways, has come to appreciate its merits. It is a useful kind of deflection.

‘Yes …’

‘Okay, take you long to get there, you got to get the bus, traffic’s bad …?’ Bob rattles questions like statements. The traffic is probably no worse than any other day, but traffic is like weather, part of the armour.

‘Not too long,’ and I feel Dalmar tighten. ‘See you.’

He turns away. Interesting, I think, why is where he lives something he needs to be secretive about? I follow him.

Dalmar turns left out of the station but instead of heading towards Waitrose, he veers right across the car park and towards the Brewery Tap. I wonder if he’s going for a breakfast pint – but he skirts the pub then walks along and crosses Bright Street, and I understand immediately why he is cagey about where he lives. It’s because it’s so close to the station. The streets round this way – they are considered the rough part of town. It was white working-class, once upon a time, with its tiny terraced houses originally intended for railway workers and navvies – my own grandparents grew up on Russell Street. Then, for a while during my adolescence it was called, in that casually racist way some people have, ‘Pakiland’. It had a couple of pubs that let in underage drinkers. One of the boys at school managed to have no fewer than three eighteenth birthday parties in the Hen House on Lincoln Road. Most of the Asian immigrant families did well for themselves in the taxi and minicab trade and gradually moved out to the suburbs and now it is a mix of white working-class, Africans and East Europeans. Several decades of the UK’s ethnic history exist in microcosm here. It is, of course, exactly the kind of area where someone like Dalmar would live, which is why he will never admit to his co-workers that he does.