Angie was a gullible woman. That’s how he put it, anyway. I think she was a troubled soul who was looking for answers, seeking some sort of guidance through life. Calvin wouldn’t understand this; it wasn’t his sort of thing. I was finding myself getting more and more defensive on Angie’s behalf. In fact, I was getting rather fond of her. Maybe because I knew what lay ahead.

Calvin took a sip of the disgusting prison coffee. ‘But then she got into the climate lark. Big time.’

It was triggered by something she read online. Whatever it was, it had a profound effect. First, she stopped eating meat. In fact, she wouldn’t have it in the house.

‘Bloody lentils,’ said Calvin. ‘Bloody rabbit food. I was farting from here to Christmas.’

Calvin wasn’t this unreconstructed; we’d eaten Lebanese mezes often enough. Prison seemed to be bringing out the Neanderthal in him. Maybe it was the company he was keeping.

At first he thought it was just another fad. He soon realised, however, that this was something different. Within weeks Angie’s character changed. She’d never been a bossy woman but now she started haranguing him about the pollution levels of his beloved Range Rover; she turned off the heating in the swimming pool and cancelled their holiday to the Maldives. She became increasingly militant, lecturing their friends, going on marches and mounting petitions outside the Potters Bar Tesco. Calvin suspected she was donating large sums of money to Extinction Rebellion but he had no way of knowing this, not yet.

‘She swallowed the whole thing, hook, line and sinker,’ he said. ‘You’d think she was on a one-woman mission to save the world. And—get this—she started nagging me about my job. She said it was immoral and poisoning the planet. She’d spout these statistics about flying and carbon emissions. It was my work, for fuck’s sake! I’d built up that business from scratch, it was my baby and I was proud of it. She started showing me up in front of my friends, humiliating me, know what I mean?’

‘Maybe there was a touch of mea culpa about it, that she’d been so guilty herself, whizzing around the place burning up fossil fuels.’

He shrugged. He wasn’t interested in my opinion; that wasn’t the point.

His fragile, dim wife became a battleaxe. Worse still, a depressive.

‘Where’d she gone, my Ange? Into some black hole, and I couldn’t pull her out. One day I came into the bathroom and there she was sitting on the floor, crying her little eyes out, banging on about plastics in the ocean and turtles tangled up in fishing lines and whatnot. She was spending half her time on her computer, scaring herself witless.’