I had not prepared well for the interview with Emily Nardini. On the night before, the magazine had held their January awards ceremony in a warehouse in Bethnal Green. The magazine likes to position itself in strict opposition to the penitent mood of January, the temporary veganism and abstinence. It is catered by the owner’s mate who runs a series of Satanic burger joints done out in apocalyptic Gilbert & George-style stained glass. There are mounds of ‘murdered yogi’ burgers, pitchers of rum cocktails, envelopes full of chisel and big thick Es the size of Scrabble tiles being passed around. Such things once had appeal, but these days I would rather have skipped it – except it was politic to make an appearance. Jonathan, the advertising director, is a man I met in the previous millennium at what was then called the London College of Printing. I would only cautiously describe Jonathan as a friend, for reasons you will come to understand, and last week he had casually mentioned to me that Stev’n was talking about cutting my books page, in favour of a legal highs column. I had not been reassured by Jonathan’s reassurance that if this did happen I would be the first choice to write the legal highs column, that Stev’n had a great respect for my ability to enjoy narcotics, and I would probably be paid more money for it. At the party I intended to catch Stev’n when he was flying on a cocktail of empathogens and subtly implant within him an association between my books page and euphoria. But in the end I spent most of the night talking to a woman a few years older than me, the managing director of a clothing company who advertised with us, about who our favourite character in Middlemarch was – Dorothea, obviously, not the feckless millennial she ends up with – in between accepting bumps of cocaine from the corner of her credit card and downing martinis from the free bar. You wouldn’t know from looking at me, but I’ve got a real thing about the nineteenth-century novel. I know my freedoms dwarf those of its heroines, but that doesn’t stop me identifying with women anxious to see if their saviour will arrive.

The managing director and I were surprised to be having a conversation about Victorian novels in a crowd of 25-year-olds dancing to grime, spilling cocktails and taking dabs of MDMA; and I wondered if she might be interested in me, if she had space in her flat, if she wanted a child, if we could come to a civilised arrangement we could reasonably name ‘love’.