What was Quin playing at? Building me up higher, so I had further to fall? But surely that would rebound on him – he’d look a fool if he turned around now and said, ‘This guy Bick, this #thinkfluencer, he’s an incompetent drunk.’ Perhaps it was just head games, designed to produce exactly this confusion and angst. Perhaps it was entirely innocent and he really thought I was a #brainleader and so on.

Improving the connectivity of the human network, Quin said about Tamesis – setting up chance meetings and happy accidents, boosting social capital and creative collaboration. It was all in his TED Talk: Steves Jobs and Wozniak are introduced by a mutual friend, Lennon meets McCartney at a church fête. ‘You could call it fate,’ Quin puns, strutting around on the stage. Pause for laughter. ‘I call it the connectivity dividend. A day without an unexpected encounter is a day wasted. Loneliness, isolation, exclusion – that’s the noise in the human network. We need to boost the signal.’

Well maybe, Quin, but in my experience connection caused plenty of noise of its own.

Another Quin aphorism: ‘The only sure way to predict is to make things happen.’

Make things happen. I found Alexander De Chauncey’s Tamesis profile and added him as a contact. Then I had second thoughts: if he looked at my Tamesis profile, if his account wasn’t handled by his PR, the first thing he would see would be that Quin post. What I was doing the previous evening, instead of seeing him. Did that look rude? Or did it look … high-powered? Might it raise his opinion of me?

For good measure, I T-plussed him. That wouldn’t have any effect unless he followed me back, but if he did follow, I would be ready.

Another Quin quote: ‘We rely on chance – why not make it reliable?’

I really should get some work done, but I was down to my last can and I feared that if I didn’t go to the shop, my anxiety about the fridge might impair my productivity. And I couldn’t go to the shop without getting dressed, so for the time being I was staying put. My phone was beside me. Notifications still came in from time to time, new contacts on Tamesis, new Twitter followers. It was on vibrate, so when it was down the side of the sofa I had hardly noticed it in the din of power tools from next door. I might have missed Pierce’s call altogether had I not been holding the phone in my hand, dismissing notifications, when it rang.

‘Jack.’ His tone was business-like, unpromising.

‘Hi.’

‘I’ve come to a realisation,’ Pierce said.