‘A bit. But it would be good to hear about it from you.’

‘When we reached our teens we told each other our parents never really wanted children. I know they are charming, and I have no doubt they are fond of you, and you of them. But they didn’t do the hard parenting stuff, like asking us what we wanted. They just expected us to come top of the class, win prizes, to honour them.’

While other kids were reading the Beano and DC comics, we were presented with The Little Red Schoolbook, Simone de Beauvoir and books on Marxist theory too numerous to mention. I rebelled. I hated it. From about the age of twelve or thirteen I nicked money from them to buy porn mags. I would sleep over at friends without telling them. I smoked, drank, took drugs. This was Bohemian North London in the seventies. Everything was available. And the thing is, our parents didn’t even seem to notice. They had their own important lives, especially after they moved part of the time to Oxford. We were supposed to amuse and impress them over the breakfast and dinner table but otherwise look after ourselves. This didn’t seem to be a problem for Clare who worked hard. But I was intent on failing. And it was Clare, when I was fifteen, and she was seventeen, who saved me.

I explain to Charles that in my circle of school friends we progressed pretty quickly from cannabis, to speed and then to LSD. ‘One night, I was at my mate Dave’s and we’d all dropped a tab. I had a really bad trip. I was shouting and screaming, terrified. I could see devils and demons and I was freaking my friends out. Apparently I was doing that clichéd thing of saying I could fly and that I would show them.

‘Dave panicked, rang the house and Clare picked up. She came straightaway and told my idiot friends she would take over. She calmed me down, took me outside, held my hand. And we just walked for hours until the stuff was out of my system.’ I look hard at Charles. ‘Clare sort of saved my life. Or at least, that is how I always thought about it.’

I become self-conscious. ‘This must be boring for you. Sorry. We should be talking about you, not me.’ And for the second time that day, the walls of my throat close in. But this time I control myself; it may be the chore of drying dishes that I’ve continued to do on automatic.

‘I did know something about that,’ he says.