To my utter amazement, and Charlie’s utter delight, the review went bonkers. You could say viral, by Lake District standards. The Cumbria Chronicle editor called me into his office, not to fire me, as I’d expected, but to offer me a part-time job writing reviews for the paper, providing I continued with the humour.

Back when I’d tentatively applied to study English at university, with the faint, flimsy hope that maybe one day someone would pay me to write something, I would have been horrified at the thought of mocking and criticising people’s livelihoods for a cheap laugh.

But in the three years since graduating I’d had seventeen rejections for the novel I’d submitted to agents and publishers. All attempts at getting a different job with a less tenuous link to writing had failed. I was broke, bored out of my brains and beyond tired of getting up at 5.30 to cook a dozen breakfasts before going to work.

And, more to the point, I was still sleeping in a room so tiny that even with bunkbeds, only one of us could move about in there at a time.

Something needed to change.

I tried to keep things kind, and fair, but the worse the reviews were, the more people loved them. Once a week I found somewhere different – maybe a backwater pub, or a flashy, up-itself brasserie. If the food was okay, I would say that, and then maybe throw in something amusing about a poor member of staff, or the décor. Perhaps how the menu struggled to cater for allergies. I would rope in someone else from the newspaper, or occasionally drag one of the Tufted Duck staff along on some made up pretext. Every few months, Charlie rocked into town and we’d blitz several places in one weekend. Often, I went alone, which led to me more than once being able to write about a slimy waiter’s attempts to hit on me. In the two years I wrote for the Chronicle, I wrote overwhelmingly positive reviews. I worked hard to find fantastic places to feature as a counterweight to the few necessarily dreadful ones. The first great article was for a restaurant specifically set up to provide training and jobs to those with learning difficulties. The food there was outstanding. Following my review, they were able to open a second restaurant in Kendal. Another was a couple who had a buy-one-share-one scheme, providing a meal for a homeless person for every meal paid for, along with cookery and gardening classes for clients of local foodbanks. One bakery was just so delightful I couldn’t find a single bad thing to say about it. A café run by a Somalian couple who’d arrived as asylum seekers a decade earlier was similar. I also gave a fabulous review for the breakfast at the Tufted Duck. Over the months, their popularity grew. Restaurant owners knew that a positive review would see an immediate increase in custom, and the token ‘although I was somewhat disappointed by…’ mention became like a local in-joke, whereby readers knew if the worst I could come up with was a dodgy ceiling tile in the toilets or a rude fellow diner, then the place was excellent. The power was overwhelmingly terrifying and addictive at the same time.