‘I think that’s the word. But I don’t mean it in a bad way. I just don’t have a plan. And that’s unusual for a lot of people. Makes them anxious. But I’m cool just … ambling.’ He swirled the straw around his cup pensively. ‘Does that make sense?’ he asked, looking at me. ‘That I actually find a lot of comfort in not having a plan?’

I thought about the last ten days. I thought about the last fifteen years. ‘I think it takes strength of character not to plan,’ I decided. ‘I feel so much pressure – and I don’t even really know where it comes from. Myself, probably. Society? The patriarchy? My mother?’

‘You’re afraid of disappointing people,’ he said.

Was that a statement or a question? For some reason it landed like an accusation. Afraid of disappointing people? I think that was my default setting. Mum, Dad, Freddie, work, Alexander, the Core Four, Adzo – I didn’t for a second want to do anything that displeased them or made them think less of me. If everyone around me was okay, then I was okay. On the list of priorities in my life, I came at the bottom, because that’s what good, selfless women did, wasn’t it? They looked after everyone else to prove their goodness. Nice women found their worth in that, and I wanted to be nice. I wanted to be considered good.

I sighed. ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘Something like that.’

‘There’s this writer called Glennon Doyle who says that it’s not worth disappointing yourself to please somebody else. She says life is the opposite, in fact. That you have to make a game out of disappointing other people for as long as it takes to never disappoint yourself.’

The notion of that was outrageous to me.

‘That sounds … selfish,’ I said, a tiny voice in the very back of my head contradicting me as it roared: That sounds AMAZING, actually!

‘I don’t know,’ he mused. ‘Think about it: if we are all disappointing ourselves over and over in order to never upset anybody else, aren’t we putting the same pressure on them? If we all put ourselves first, wouldn’t that give permission for other people to put themselves first? Wouldn’t we all be happier?’

I thought about what he was saying, but it sounded suspicious to me.

‘Is that how you live? Honestly?’

He shrugged. ‘The way I see it, we’re all looking to each other for permission to be free, so I’m happy to go first and give it. Nobody knows how much time they have left, so there’s no point wasting it trying to be good when it’s so much more fun to keep having fun.’

‘Your life sounds nice.’

He hit his shoulder against mine good-humouredly.

‘Your life isn’t?’