I deliberately showed up in my glasses, with my hair unwashed, to avoid any accidental inference about my intentions. I needn’t have worried, because he showed up in a paint-splattered T-shirt after painting and decorating all morning and, I have to say, meeting for an afternoon pint was very much like something friends would do. We’d settled in to a booth in the corner of the pub, him on one side of the table and me on the other, the street and everyone passing us by on the other side of the glass. The chat had been easy and entertaining, exactly as I’d hoped.

‘Were you there the year we did, urm – oh gosh. The one with the grandparents in bed …’

I dropped my jaw in faux-shock that he couldn’t remember the name of it. ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!’ I giggled. ‘How can you not know the name of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?’

‘I’m an old man now,’ he said, shrugging. ‘The names of shows escape me. I can still remember every lyric to every song in Aladdin though.’

We’d been reliving old memories and filling in the gaps of each other’s blanks for two hours and three drinks’ worth of time.

‘That’s good going,’ I said, and then, changing the subject slightly: ‘It’s sad, really. But I’ve not done any theatre since Yak Yak. I suppose I left the summer before I did my GCSE year and then once I’d finished school I figured I was too old for that sort of stuff.’ I drained my glass, totally lost in the back-and-forth between us. ‘What did you do then?’ I asked. ‘After school?’

‘Inter-railed Europe, got my heart broken by a French girl, wrote some bad songs about it,’ he admitted, his face making it very clear that he knew how to laugh at his eighteen-year-old self.

‘That sounds suspiciously similar to the plot of Before Sunrise,’ I countered.

‘Are you calling me a cliché?’

‘That depends,’ I teased. ‘Did you grow out your facial hair into a patchy moustache and spend the next four years wearing a smelly old vintage leather jacket that you’d tell anyone who’d listen you got when you travelled Europe?’

‘Wow, were you my twenty-something stalker?’

‘You have to say it in the voice, too. You can’t just say, “Oh! I got it when I travelled Europe!” you have to be all gruff and mysterious.’ I dropped my pitch by a few tones and grumbled, ‘“I got it when I travelled Europe.” As if you were sent to the Battle of the Somme, not drinking 50p beer in the Czech Republic.’

‘Okay, okay,’ he said, holding up his hands in surrender. ‘Get out of my head now please. I cannot withstand this character assassination, for I am but a humble, sensitive insurance salesman now. And anyway – who were you after you left school? Ms Goody-Goody?’