I don’t want to bang on about Ness’s beauty because I despise this whole beauty obsession, but I have to say, after initially having been oblivious to it, I was now continually left-fielded by it: we’d be chatting away about human motivation or medieval doctors or the extraordinary Caravaggio (her favourite), and I would get distracted by the gorgeous tone of her skin, or those large dark eyes, or those unnaturally red lips – the sort that Shakespeare would eulogize about (where did that extra blood come from?), or her perfect teeth, or the petiteness of her, those high cheekbones, those full breasts. Nature had been a little unfair on the donating front; I felt crudely crafted next to her. Don’t get me wrong: she wasn’t perfect but it would be mean to point out that perhaps her hair was a little too frizzy, or her fingers on the stumpy side, or her skin a little moley – all that was lost in the glory of the whole. There was something undeniably feminine about her and yet she had a solidity, a capability, an appetite, an athleticism which was quite masculine.

At this stage I wasn’t consciously smitten with her; I was still representing myself quite well. I had yet to be skinned, deboned and filleted. And I don’t want to give you the wrong impression – I was smart and cool and pretty impressive in my own way (there is no room for false modesty in these records, wouldn’t you agree?). No, I’d never doubted my own attractiveness; it had never been an issue for me, but she was in a different league.

It’s surprising how much dancing can be done in a car. The Temptations were bemoaning frustrated love. Lyrics don’t come much better than theirs. It turned out, to our mutual delight, that we were both pedants on the lyric front, agreeing that a bad lyric could ruin a musician’s whole oeuvre; personally, I had never forgiven Prince for slipping the word restaurant into an otherwise faultless song. It’s kind of inexcusable; the word had no business in a lyric at all. I’m digressing. My point is – it’s an intimate act, sharing music, not dissimilar to Polly and Annie sharing diary dates. There is an element of risk in exposing your tastes but Ness and I appeared to be of one mind. If we quibbled about a song it wasn’t a problem: we’d persuade or dissuade, pause the track, debate a lyric, look for consistency, laugh or change our minds; we were in harmony.