The time was approaching 1 p.m. The interview with De Chauncey was scheduled for 3 p.m. I had, at most, half an hour of pub time. My phone had been on silent during the interview, a basic courtesy, and I had avoided checking it, to avoid repercussions from the incident with Alan, and to postpone confronting the De Chauncey arrangements. And, as I could have predicted, there was an email from the Wolfe / De Chauncey press person confirming the time and asking for my mobile number ‘in case’. Alongside half a dozen other emails, there were notifications from the various social networks – just likes, nothing out of the ordinary. But on Tamesis, there was an invite from Kay. That was potentially awkward. She was on my T-plus list: if convenient (and if it suited the machinations of Quin’s algorithms) Tamesis would discreetly try to guide us into ‘chance’ meetings. A meeting I would, for the time being, prefer to avoid. I could unplus her, take her off the list, or even give her the dreaded T-minus, for people you wanted to avoid – Tamesis would then not recommend venues where it knew, or believed, she might be. But that was brutal. T-minusing was for your exes, creeps, people you weren’t talking to, deadbeat pseudo-friends, creditors. The system gave you no indication you had been T-minused, just as you have no idea if someone has muted you on Twitter. Naturally, T-minusing was one of the big selling points of Tamesis – arguably more popular than its ability to cause you to run into your friends more often. Quin affected to be embarrassed by the T-minus function as it ran against his cheerful, utopian picture of London (and, soon, the rest of the country) becoming smaller, friendlier and better connected. It wasn’t even possible in the earliest releases. So why did he enable it?

‘Bunk doesn’t believe in denying people tools,’ Quin said. ‘T-minusing is feasible, it’s useful, so the greater sin would be to disallow it.’

He didn’t say this to me, mind, or if he did I didn’t get it down – I’ve taken that quote from elsewhere. It’s classic Quin, though: practicality held up as a moral quality in itself, overall shine of sanctimony, completely self-serving. As if it had never occurred to him that an app that helped you avoid people would be as popular as his dream of an app that helped you find people. And so it proved. Hardly a week went by without an Evening Standard or Guardian feature about the new etiquette of T-plus and T-minus. Who knew what would happen when Bunk launched Tamesis nationally later this year.

There weren’t a huge number of pubs near Pierce, but several were warm-rated on Tamesis.