Better not to think back. Better to forget fickle human passions from the past and concentrate on the solid reliable loves of the present – his car, his television, his computer. Jomier likes technology. He admires the skill and audacity of scientists and engineers – the Channel Tunnel, the Millau Viaduct, the mobile telephone, the Oyster card, the DSG automatic transmission on his Volkswagen Golf. He feels physically strengthened by the torque of his car’s turbo-diesel engine and mentally empowered by the software on his computer. Each is more than a mere convenience. Jomier rarely drives anywhere because the roads are clogged with traffic; and he is aware that he spends too much of his waking life creating spreadsheets and entering names and numbers into databases; but he is proud of the end result. With only two or three keystrokes he can discover how much money he spent in August 1998 on groceries, petrol, gifts, books, wine, telephone (landline) or telephone (mobile); or how many people he knows who live in W11 (Notting Hill), how many in W6 (Hammersmith), how many he has classed as friends, how many as acquaintances and how many are dead.

When someone dies, Jomier enters ‘dead’ next to their name on his FileMaker Pro database. At first he typed the initials RIP for ‘rest in peace’ or rather, given Jomier’s views on mortality, ‘rot in perpetuity’; but, because the search engine is not case-sensitive, it meant that Johnny Ripley and Sue Ripon come up as deceased when they are not. Or so Jomier supposes. ‘Dead’ serves Jomier’s purpose: he has no friends or acquaintances whose names contain the consecutive letters d-e-a-d. He considers entering ‘lost touch’ by the names of Johnny Ripley (a fellow student at Oxford) and Sue Ripon (a girl he briefly dated before he met Tilly), and by the names of those friends and acquaintances he has not seen for a number of years. But as he flicks through the database, he realises that there are too many. Easier to write ‘still in touch’ or ‘current’, but Jomier does not do this. There are too few.