Later, while she has her bath, I try to beat back her chaotic bedroom into some kind of order. And later still, when she’s in bed, I settle downstairs on the sofa with my laptop. I’m intending to browse career advice from those websites aimed at mid-life women; the ones filled with inspiring stories of women who have changed direction and achieved wonderful things.

I don’t even consider googling Estelle Lang. The last thing I need this evening is to be confronted by her challenging gaze. However, I do find myself veering off track, first as I try again to find out any information about Penny’s boyfriend, Hamish Knowles, the supposedly celebrated composer. Nothing new to unearth there, as far as I can make out.

Moving on to Penny herself, I sip my lukewarm tea as I flick through interviews with her from back in her heyday (would she take exception to that? That I regard the Seventies as her ‘golden years?’). Although they hark back to a pre-internet era, there’s tons about her online. Some of those early interviews have been reformatted for slick, modern fashion blogs, or scanned in from the original magazine pages.

When we first became friends, I looked her up and read some of these features out of sheer nosiness. After all, it’s not often you stumble upon someone like Penny Barnett in the park. Izzy and I pored over them together, marvelling over pictures of her as a stunning, vibrant woman in her twenties, not so different to how she is now (she is blessed with one of ‘those’ faces, with big, bright eyes, full lips and incredible cheekbones, that ages beautifully). However, now I’m discovering many more interviews with her – and gorgeous photos – that I’d never seen before. The sight of her smiling face, so open and joyous, plus her glamorous floppy hats and red lipsticked smile, lifts my spirits.

Since Nick has arrived from New Zealand, I haven’t seen much of her. Despite her grumblings that he’ll ‘only be checking I’m coping’, I have backed off a little, having assumed that they’ll want to spend as much time as possible together. I also worry that his first impression of me is of a raving madwoman (this seems to be bothering me more than it should). Penny has assured me that of course it wasn’t, that he’d been ‘surprised, yes, but impressed by your performance’, and that it was one of the highlights of her year so far. ‘I might start doing it myself,’ she chuckled.

Curling up on the sofa now, I finish my tea and settle on an article about her from a newspaper’s Sunday supplement in 1978.