You can be quite blunt sometimes, you know. The point is, I don’t want to represent, I want to be. You get tempted to represent, because the rewards for it are instantaneous, and also representing feels like a correction to all the times you are misrepresented – by people who judge you solely by your image, by the media, by people who misunderstand your work because they are too distracted to properly pay attention to it but also feel obligated to have an opinion on it. I am aware that I could press the ‘broadcast’ switch and we could flip this conversation and make it live, show people this entire walk, and that I would feel an instant sense of warmth and connection, or a digital mimicry of it, and people would be all like ‘Bea, we have missed you so much! It’s so nice to see you!’ and that is not totally unappealing to one part of my brain that I have tried to understand more extensively over recent times. But then I know I’d feel a bit hollow afterwards, and what would it have achieved, apart from giving away some of my life, when really I’m quite fine just being here with you?

Yes, with me. Whatever I am. That’s nice. I am touched. Even though you can’t actually touch me, physically.

I think you know how I feel about the Friendly But Edgy record by now. I think it’s an OK pop album, for the naive and noisy and pliable being I was at that point in my life. I am sure I will never have a record sell that many copies again and I am fine with that, and am especially fine with not experiencing many of the social and administrative by-products of that. It seems like a very… obedient record to me now, although that is probably as much about the image of the record that is reflected back at me by society as it is about the record itself. I’d sometimes look at me, this me that existed inside a virtual space, in the aftermath of that – and the aftermath of Rust to an extent, even though that was a smaller record, ‘the difficult second album’ I suppose you’d call it – and I’d not recognise this person who allegedly made them, this other person that a distracted hive mind had created and existed solely inside people’s visors. There’d be these huge online spaces where people would talk about the lyrics to ‘Thirty-Second Casanova’, explaining exactly which parts of my romantic life I was writing about in the lyrics, which disappointments and failures, when in reality nearly all of it was based on a story my friend Laura had told me back when I was in Year 11 at school.

Was Laura a Laura, by any chance?