In the summer of 2005 I moved out of my mother’s house again and got a job in a travel agency. It was the sort of place where everything was on display: the holiday deals in the window, the bottles of Perrier in the microfridges lined up beneath the main counter, the employees. Those were the years before everything moved online: Skyscanner had one paid employee, probably working out of some shithole student flat in Edinburgh; lastminute.com was cutting its losses by going into third-party acquisition; Airbnb was just a glint in the eye of some San Franciscan hippie entrepreneur. Good middle-class mothers still taught good little middle-class girls that sleeping on a stranger’s couch was a sure way to get oneself in trouble, regardless of how many stars someone had on CouchSurfing. In those years, travel agencies still made a profit with a younger crowd.

To attract these people, though, agencies needed us: the travel agents. Bait for the corporate thrill-seeker, making it happen for the not-so-adventurous student travelling to Thailand on a shoestring. Sleek, young, well dressed (in a non-threatening way, of course), we sat at parallel desks facing the street, encouraged by the management, if not to straight up walk out front to engage customers in direct conversation, then surely to make the best of our good looks. Through the glass pane, we smiled at anyone who looked even vaguely in our direction. But though the window was regularly refurbished (verdant plastic palm leaves on a bed of real sand as a backdrop for the summer deals to exotic beach destinations, colourful cardboard reproductions of the Kremlin on a bed of polystyrene snow for the winter deals to European capitals) and my colleagues and I made a fine smiling army of mannequins, business was slow that particular summer. Crushingly slow. I spent most days greasing up my side parting by running my fingers through it, bored to death, gazing out of the window like a sulky teenager. Then, somewhat unexpectedly, though I had been walking past its gates for three months, the nursing college across the street reopened for the autumn term.