I shake my head. ‘I think the fact I don’t know if it’s a tiller or a rudder is probably a good reason to stay where I am.’

‘Alex?’ Becky asks.

‘Go on, then.’ He grins at me and they perform a slightly dodgy manoeuvre that makes the boat wobble alarmingly.

‘Next stop—’ he shades his eyes and peers ahead ‘— The Pirate Castle.’

‘The Pirate Castle? As in an actual castle?’ I ask.

‘Nope.’ He laughs. ‘It’s actually a charity that do stuff on boats with kids from disadvantaged backgrounds.’

‘How do you know so much about it?’ We sail past and there’s a group of kids in life jackets climbing onto a boat.

‘The company I used to work for did some fundraising for them.’

‘So they weren’t just about corporate greed?’ I tease him.

‘No, they did some good stuff.’ He pushes his hair back from his face. ‘I mean there was a fair old amount of corporate crap in there as well.’

I think about my ill-fated date with whatshisname, the investment banker. That was on a boat, too. I seem to be floating my way through my first year in London.

And then we’re back at London Zoo, the enclosure a huge geometric shape that stretches high above the trees.

‘D’you think we’ll see our giraffe again?’ Alex peers upwards.

A group of people sunbathing on the top of a houseboat raise their glasses to us as we pass them, and Becky takes out a pack of beers from the bag she’d stowed under the table.

‘Cheers,’ we say, clinking the necks of our bottles together.

We float on, lazily, up to Camden Lock, where there’s a traffic jam of boats, and back round again, heading towards home. My stomach rumbles so loudly that it makes Alex laugh.

‘Shall we go and get food after this?’ he asks. He doesn’t know that Rob’s been hard at work all morning, creating a feast for us to have when we get back. I look at Rob, raising my eyebrows in query. He nods, subtly.

‘Why don’t you two go and get a snack when we drop this back at the pontoon, and Rob and I will head back?’

If I didn’t know Becky better, I’d swear she was trying to put us in a situation where we were forced together, alone. But a) Becky’s not a matchmaking sort (she’s way too practical for that) and b) that’s not what today is about. We’re supposed to be taking Alex’s mind off his not-wedding. And she’s got absolutely no idea how I feel about him. I think I’ve done a pretty good job of hiding it. I hope I have, anyway.