I marvelled at the memory. Yak Yak was my favourite place in the world when I was just into my teens. Actually, when I was about Freddie’s age. For the whole of August, kids from all over the country got shipped off to the New Forest by their parents, living in a big holiday home, like American summer camp. We played silly games and did trust exercises and painted sets and ran lines and performed monologues. It was incredible. Totally incredible. And for some reason I just stopped going. The summer I was fifteen I didn’t want to go back, and so it turned out my last stint on stage was exactly the moment this guy whose name I didn’t know remembered.

‘Patrick,’ he said, as if he could hear my thoughts. ‘I’m Patrick Hummingbird. You might remember me as Paddy?’

As soon as he said it, it was like his face did one of those reverse ‘Evolution Of’ videos that they do on people.com of celebrities through the ages. They start with a photo of George Clooney when he was in ER, and then it morphs into a photo of him in his first feature film, and then becomes a photo of him as Batman, and so on until it’s a photo of him walking into Prince Harry’s wedding with Amal on his arm. In my head I had to shrink the biceps in front of me and add in a bit more hair and un-straighten his teeth and make him shorter but then, suddenly, I could see him by a light rig working out where to put a spotlight and talking to a senior drama teacher and helping people memorize lines and laughing. That’s it. I remembered him as always laughing. He’d been the group clown, the boy always guaranteed to put a smile on your face.

‘Paddy Hummingbird! Yes! Shit! Out of all the bootcamps in all the world …’

‘I squat-lunged into this one,’ he supplied, getting my Casablanca reference immediately. He added: ‘And it’s Patrick, now. I’m trying to do the grown-up thing.’

‘Patrick,’ I echoed.

‘Can I give you a hug?’ he questioned, taking a step towards me.

‘Oh, urm, yes, sure! I’m so sweaty but hi!’ I opened out my arms and tried to keep my armpits from having contact with his clothes. I could feel my own dampness even through my jumper – that is how hard I’d worked out. I was still pouring sweat fifteen minutes after finishing. ‘It’s so nice to run into you!’

I got a whiff of him as we dipped in, and then pulled away. He didn’t smell old or fusty. He smelled manly. Potent. Paddy Hummingbird. What were the chances?