Which sounds like a load of bollix to me: no one likes being turned into a bit part in someone else’s fantasy. If that reaches my face, Rory can’t see it, not with his glasses off; but he says, like he heard me thinking, ‘She did. Just to give you an idea: when we went for dinner, I said to her that it felt like we’d known each other for years. Aislinn said yes, she felt the same way – she said something like “Maybe we did meet, somewhere along the way. It’s a small country . . .” So I said, “Maybe we played together when we were little. Six, maybe. In a playground, in autumn. Maybe you’d brought your doll along . . .” Aislinn was smiling, and she said she always did bring her doll to the playground, a grubby old thing called Caramel. So I said, “Maybe you put Caramel down on a bench, so she could watch you on the swings, and I was on the swing next to yours. And then another little girl came along and thought Caramel had been abandoned, and picked her up . . .” ’

Remembering the doll’s name would have been adorable in the groom’s speech; in this context, it’s well over the line into creepy. Rory’s smiling faintly, back at the Aislinn in his memory. ‘I told her the whole story. The two of us saw the other little girl taking Caramel away, so we escaped from our families and followed her and her mother onto a bus and all the way into town, running after her down O’Connell Street, into Clery’s – I said a Guard went after us, but we dodged and hid inside a huge umbrella, and we foiled a pickpocket by tripping him up with the point of the umbrella . . . It turned out that the pickpocket had just robbed the little girl’s mother’s wallet, and they were so grateful to us, the little girl didn’t even mind giving Caramel back to Aislinn. And she and her mother brought us home in a horse-drawn carriage.’

Holy Jaysus. By this time I would have been out of the restaurant and halfway home, on the phone to my mate Lisa, breaking my shite laughing and swearing off relationships for life. ‘I see what you mean about the date going great guns,’ I say, smiling away. ‘That must’ve been lovely.’