Anya went off for a year travelling after university. I often said things about how great it would be to do this together. But if I was honest, it was only in the way that I thought space travel might be interesting. I didn’t have much of an appetite for roughing it in some of the flea-bitten hostels Anya waxed lyrical about when she talked of that time. I didn’t know. Maybe when you have grown up having foreign holidays in luxury hotels, the idea of a bit of squalor has more appeal. Me, I liked to travel in comfort. There was no way we could afford to travel the way I would want to.

And what about our jobs?

She looked at me with an expression that I couldn’t read. Then she made a moue and took another swig of her wine. I realized I’d finished mine and I refilled both of our glasses. I’d somehow finished my plate of stir fry without even noticing but Anya had only had about a third of hers.

‘I don’t know,’ she said after a moment. ‘Weren’t you the one who was just talking about how shit your job is?’

I put my plate onto the coffee table a little too hard, so it rattled against the wood and my fork clanged.

‘That’s not what I was saying at all,’ I said, aware I was breathing heavily now. ‘I just had a bad day.’

Look, I complained bitterly like most teachers, but actually, I loved my job and I loved kids. The untrammelled, shiny-eyed joy, the all-consuming misery when your best friend is being a little sod, or you’ve bumped your head, the infectious giggling, the constant miasma of farting.

I probably didn’t seem all that ambitious to some people. When a couple of Anya’s friends found out that not only had I not gone to Oxbridge, Durham, or Bristol, but I’d done my degree through Open University while working in a Virgin Media call centre, they had looked genuinely baffled about what to say next. It was as though I’d just admitted to having herpes or enjoying taxidermy as a hobby.

I’d half wanted to tell them that where I came from, not serving time or being dead from a range of unnatural causes was an achievement in itself. But I’d kept quiet, not wanting to frighten the horses too much; sensitive thoroughbreds that they were.

Anya started out studying medicine at Cambridge, then, after not getting on with the course, moved to Bristol where she took Biology. She worked for a company that specialized in software packages for the NHS and health organizations around the world.

She earned much more money than me. That was just the way it was.