And so we discovered that we were neighbours. She lived just around the corner from us – only four doors away. In fact, I could see her house from the back windows of my own. Our conversation shifted then, as it became evident our lives would be impacting on each other’s – screaming children, rows in the garden, perhaps noisy once-in-a-blue-moon lovemaking on a hot summer night. Why do we women feel impelled to forge intimacies? Two men probably wouldn’t have struck up a conversation at all.

I’d opened Annie’s snack box by now and was picking at some soggy strawberries as our talk moved smoothly from our surroundings and our progeny to ourselves.

‘What do you do?’ she asked me.

‘I write,’ I said.

And without a pause or a further question she said, ‘I write too!’ Something about the way she said it, so rapid a response, seemed rather competitive – I got that tug again.

‘What do you write?’ I asked, offering her a sweating strawberry which she declined.

‘Poetry.’ I looked at her afresh. That was interesting; no one admits to writing poetry. ‘When inspiration strikes,’ she added.

Well, excuse me for being a snob but that is not a writer. That is a dabbler. A writer doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for inspiration; a writer plods on regardless, a writer takes the gamble, lives in penury, gives everything up to be a slave to her art. I didn’t let my feelings show, but I suppose in my own way I went straight for the jugular.

‘Do you make a living from it?’

‘No, no.’

Precisely my point: she was not a writer. (We writers have to do any writing we can to fund the writing we want – I ghost-write, I interview, I copy-edit, in order to afford the time to write books that no one wants to publish.)

‘I’m—Or rather, I used to run galleries. You’ve got some . . .’ She gestured that I had some strawberry juice on my chin. I wiped it. She shook her head and gestured again so I wiped it again.

And then – perhaps you’ll disagree, perhaps you’ll think this is what any mother does – she did something that seemed strangely intimate to me: she licked her finger and gently started to rub my chin with it. And as she did so – it was a stubborn stain – I couldn’t help but take her in: the freckles, the contrast of the blonde hair with those dark eyes. I was just going to ask her about this gallery business when she said, ‘You smell really good. What perfume are you wearing?’

Again, oddly intimate, no? But I’m a sucker for a compliment and I must have visibly brightened.

‘Thank you! It’s Jo Malone: Lime Basil and Mandarin.’

She smiled. She had good teeth, neat and white, like an advert mouth. ‘It’s gorgeous.’