I run a café now, partly started up with Murdie’s money. I would rather have had Murdie than the money, but I didn’t get the choice. I was managing Delauncey’s by that time, on a decent enough salary, but I knew the business well enough not to come a cropper on my own. I added Murdie’s cash to a bank loan and poured it into a coffee shop down a side street in Soho. I didn’t have any fantasies about floating about the place, graciously playing mine host. That’s where people usually come unstuck in this game: they have a certain image of themselves.

The café’s been running for nine years, turning a good profit, enough to pay for the usual heart-stopping London mortgage on a bigger flat with high ceilings and a handkerchief of garden just off the Holloway Road. Your own place means security, everyone sagely repeated as I signed the forms, but security’s a maw that needs feeding. It turned out I had a keen instinct for business, maybe something that had passed down in the genes from Big Jacky: a knack for ordering the right stock, negotiating with suppliers, driving a hard bargain on prices but not being so stingy that they walked away or hated you. I knew how to defuse any residual tension with a joke, sensing what the customers wanted out of a place even before they could articulate it themselves.

I keep an eye on the shifting choices people crave. There are fashions in coffees and pastries like everything else, and in London people always want a new thing to tell their friends about. I’m naturally a jumpy person, keenly aware of others and their multiple urgencies. London suits me, with her surging crowds and speeding Tube trains. I understand her song.

A battered white statue of King Charles II stands in the middle of Soho Square, the patron saint of fun and decay. In the summer I check him out when I take a walk around there, and give him and his crumbling ruffles a wee nod. Now that I’m older, weighed down with necessary things to do, I respect fun more than ever: it’s a dwindling stock, grab it while you can. And I like this area, with its quaint seediness, the old dirt still doggedly whispering through the thick lick of new gloss.