The constant carnivalesque of the night buses, the queues for jerk chicken, the roped-off smoking sections. Contrary to popular stereotype, this is a friendly city we live in, often heartbreakingly so. Lack of friends is the least of our worries. There are lots of us out there, looking for each other, who think a new person is the most exciting thing. Not thing: don’t purposely misconstrue me. Sentient being. Equal. Superior.

‘I wish you could be a woman for a year,’ said Amy. ‘No, like a decade. Three decades. Then you’d see if you like to be constantly harassed and degraded.’

Amy is a serial dater in the American style that Tinder has made standard here too. She sees nothing strange about interviewing three different men a week, for a date to last forty-five minutes and consist of drinking a coffee. It is her experience, she says, that has confirmed her hypothesis that young men in London are the worst men in the world.

She gets no significant argument there from me. I know when I am beaten.

Nevertheless, I don’t think it is helpful for Amy to believe in the absolute awfulness of men in this city. ‘Don’t you think it’s dangerous for you to assume the monsters are all on the outside?’ I said once to her, only once.

She took her time thinking about which way I had annoyed her most. Neither of us likes the suggestion that we know each other better than ourselves; we worry it is true.

‘Is it somehow my fault these men have got wind of the imbalance in our ability to have children? My fault that they’re using my greater urgency as leverage to make suggestions about my pubic hair and its removal, or to bring up the subject of my ideal weight, or to refuse to make an arrangement for next Saturday, or to answer a text message? I’m talking about men, right, who place wooden shoe trees into their shoes when they take them off at night, men with separate combs and shampoos for their beards, men with Nespresso machines. For these men to want to take every day as it comes? For these men to talk about freedom?’

‘The thing is, Amy,’ I said, ‘I don’t like men much either.’

But this is even more unfair.

‘You,’ she said, ‘don’t need to.’

*