In the morning, dazed and underslept, I waited for Emily on the terrace of Euston station. We were taking the train up to Preston where we’d get another train to the end of the line, and from there the tram further up the coast to the end of another line. The next day we had an excursion planned. Emily was writing a long essay for a literary magazine prompted by a new biography of Charlotte Brontë, and we were going to get the train east for an hour to visit the parsonage where she and her sisters had written their novels.

When she arrived we headed to Marks & Spencer’s for supplies for the journey. Emily bought a bottle of water and some carrots. I bought some orange juice to mix into a breakfast cocktail with a bottle of fizzy French wine one or two letters away from champagne.

I needed the drink that day. I’d stayed up till five in the morning in a flat in Camden with Sophie and her friends, where we watched the results come in until it was clear there had been no mistake. I had invited Sophie back to mine when I got my Uber, but she couldn’t stop watching. ‘Stay a bit longer,’ she said, lying back with her legs over the laps of me and a guy called Antonio, an actor from her college who claimed to be writing a sitcom about an entomologist, and I kept staying longer until I suspected she was trying to make me miss my train, and left on my own.

After two hours’ sleep my alarm went off and I turned the telly on to watch the prime minister resign and Farage walk into what looked like a golf club full of cheering red-faced recruitment consultants wearing too much suit. Business journalists showed the pound crashing. On Facebook, acquaintances were taking it personally, talking about the racist pigs who lived outside of the city, who had ruined the country, from whom we needed to secede, form our own nation, which we would allow Scotland to be part of too.

Emily and I sat on the terrace in the sun with coffees and waited for our platform to be called while we discussed the new world we had woken into. Andrew had been up all night talking to friends on the phone, and now he was writing notes for articles, taking phone calls from radio producers. ‘He lives for these moments,’ she said.

‘For catastrophe.’

‘That’s it. He’s never happier than when he’s appalled by something.’