Whatever it was you were supposed to do, I can’t have been doing it. In 2005 I had just started working for Divider, the DVD magazine. Divider tried to compensate for its obvious anachronism by adopting a certain swagger in its editorial style, and I was exactly the kind of inexperienced but eager recruit it wanted, with a few energetic, pretentious university newspaper features to my name and not much else. This was little more than a decade ago, and remembering it now it occurs to me that today I would probably be expected to do an unpaid internship – an impossibility, with no resources and parents more than two hours from London (by the faster train). But in that forgotten golden age, 2005, they hired me right out of university. On a pittance, but in a real job.

Never mind that I had sauntered into the city across a collapsing bridge – I felt I belonged there, all right. Never have I felt less like an impostor. That first job was a resounding endorsement. No sense, yet, of the quiet doubts that had pursued me across that bridge, not an inkling of the trajectory that would take me to my humiliation on Pierce’s sofa. In the winter of 2006, I belonged. I was in.

That year Divider had its staff Christmas party in a restaurant in Soho. A back room filled with booze. I drank far too much, but so did everyone else. I know that I flirted with at least two co-workers, without consequence. I think I told the story about my uncle’s cockatoo, which isn’t true, but the timing is well rehearsed through repetition. There was a lot of smoke around that table – smoking in restaurants, a lost age for sure. It was my second Christmas party at that magazine. I had shed the novice nervousness that kept me near the corner the previous year. My co-workers were my friends and I was in my place.

The restaurant ejected us after eleven, and many of the others went to a club. Unsteady on my feet, I was gripped by an instinctive desire to grab the last Tube and go to bed before I made more of a fool of myself. I still lived in the Fulham flat-share, and opted to walk to Embankment Station, from where the District Line would take me straight home.

Soho dies hard between Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square. There’s a hinterland behind the National Gallery where the life goes from the streets, the lights recede and every building has its back to you. It was a cold night, and even with the pubs closing and the office parties winding down, few hurrying souls shared the pavements with me.