Wilkes’s grandmother was Irish and ‘sangers’, he explained to Elizabeth, was Dublinese for sandwiches, while ‘skangers’ was a term used for those unfortunate nomads who spent their days sitting on O’Connell Bridge begging for money. It had always been meant in an offensive way but, by reclaiming the term, Wilkes said he was removing its injurious effects. Intuitively, he understood the struggle of the dispossessed, he insisted, and it was important that others realized just how deeply he felt it, which was why he documented his every charitable move on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, YouTube, Flickr and TikTok, and kept a spreadsheet documenting how many likes each of his posts received and the monthly increase in his follower count.

It was Wilkes’s total obsession with social media that had first drawn Elizabeth to him, along with his perfectly spherical head, scrappy beard and strange, baby-like features that made him look as if he’d spent much of his life as an infant before transitioning to adulthood, skipping all the usual stages in between, both physically and mentally. Others might have found this particular quality repellent, but it sparked a curious desire in her and she’d followed his endless, self-serving tweets – sometimes more than fifty a day – for months before wandering into one of the soup kitchens where he volunteered. As she locked eyes with this modern-day Mother Teresa over an enormous tureen of leek, bacon and potato soup, he told her that hers were the colour of consommé, which she took as a compliment, despite the fact that consommé makes for a rather bland and unexciting meal, although, like Elizabeth herself, it was essentially fat free.

From the start, Wilkes (he/him) had told her that he saw it as his mission to make the world a better place and longed to document his trips to Africa, Asia or South America on social media, where he would help to build houses for those who currently lived in ditches and ate live rats and cockroaches.

‘Do a lot of them live in ditches and eat live rats and cockroaches?’ she asked, sceptical that things hadn’t moved on in those places in quite a big way since Live Aid.

‘Oh God, I hope so,’ he replied. ‘I feel it’s my destiny to help them. I’ve written to Bill Gates, asking him to stop throwing his money at these problems until I’ve had a chance to do my bit.’

‘I’m not really interested in charity work,’ she said on their first date. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, I approve of it in principle, but it’s not really my area. I’m more interested in becoming an influencer. Couldn’t your parents just fund your trip if you wanted to go?’

‘That would be such a bourgeois thing to do,’ he said, smiling a little at her naïveté. ‘And if you don’t mind me saying so, it’s a little jejune of you to suggest it.’