Leonard’s fingers were almost smoking as he copied something from the winning Dan’s column, flicking from the spreadsheet to Google Maps like a man possessed. Next minute, a little red flag popped up on the map and even I understood what had just happened. If I wasn’t mistaken, that little red flag was the very location of Dan McLachlan, the lucky man behind door number one.

I looked closer at the map and saw with a mild shock that Dan’s flag was staked in Barnstaple, which was only about two and a half hours’ drive away. Bloody hell, now wouldn’t that be weird. Wouldn’t that just take the piggin’ biscuit, as Jax would say.

But while I was busy considering that if Dan was “the one,” perhaps we could call the whole trip off with just an outing to Barnstaple and forget about the Fringe, Leonard had moved on to the next set of thumbnails.

Tony Simmons and I had sat beside each other in the same seats for a month’s worth of English Lit. classes, so I was fairly confident I’d recognize him. Funny what you do remember, but we fell into the same position as those lectures after we’d fumbled our way through things that one and only afternoon in his single bed. I’m not sure if I ever actually saw him from the other side, so a profile picture would probably have made things even easier. Left, as it goes. But there were only three pictures to choose from, and even with a front view and his face half obscured by somebody else’s pint, picking the correct Tony Simmons was a cinch. Once I’d confirmed his identity, Leonard went through his Google Map routine again and real Tony’s possible whereabouts were duly pinpointed. Swansea. Wales. Not so close this time.

As it turned out, though, I’d chosen a pretty unadventurous bunch for my six weeks or so of mayhem and one-night stands, because if Leonard and Google were to be trusted, all four of them had ended up within a three-hundred-mile radius of Edinburgh. James Knox, the musician, looked like he might even still be there. Even though Leonard said he couldn’t be quite sure, he had found a mobile phone number on a forum that the James in the photo I positively identified had been on looking to buy a secondhand Vespa in Edinburgh a year ago. Which gave me a bit of an indication as to how his musical career had panned out, because you don’t see too many successful jazz stars lugging around their double bass on the back of a moped, do you?

It was mildly disappointing, because I’d kind of hoped that, if we had to do this, we’d at least end up tracking one of the possible fathers to a restored villa in Tuscany, tragically but very conveniently widowed and living with four beautiful Italian half brothers and sisters just dying to meet Norman. All in all, though, Leonard’s work was pretty damn impressive and the absence of a Tuscan villa certainly wasn’t due to a lack of effort on his part.