‘Oh, it’s nothing really.’

With a jolt, I realised what I was trying to do: give the impression that this is how I roll, like blinking Nigella, throwing together a sort of carbonara when I’m home alone on an ordinary grey-skied Monday.

And now here we are, tucking into my pasta, while he asks, ‘So, have you and Mum been friends for long?’

‘About five years,’ I reply, going on to fill him in on our initial chats in the park, our meet-ups, and how fond my daughter is of her too. ‘She’s a wonderful person,’ I add.

‘Yeah, she really is,’ Nick says. ‘She’s a bit of a one-off. I wish I could see more of her, obviously.’

‘How long have you been in New Zealand?’

‘Coming up for ten years,’ he replies.

‘Did you move there for work, or—’

‘Um, not really.’ He smiles. He has her cheekbones, I realise, and those soft grey-blue eyes. His short dark hair is flecked with a touch of grey, his build slender, verging on rangy; he looks young for his years in a black T-shirt and jeans. There’s a touch of shyness about him, and it’s clear that he is unaware of how attractive he is. ‘I was on holiday in San Francisco,’ he goes on, ‘and I met someone there. It was a bit of a whirlwind thing. She’s from Auckland, and we moved there and got married, but it didn’t work out.’ He does a sort of shrug thing as he lays his fork in his bowl.

‘But you decided to stay there?’ I prompt him.

‘Yeah, work had sort of taken off for me there. I hadn’t had much luck over here.’ He smiles self-deprecatingly. ‘I don’t know what it was – maybe a bigger fish in a smaller pond, kind of situation? Anyway, I got lucky, and this latest thing – the steam railway project – was ideal. It meant I could combine work with spending some proper time with Mum.’

I nod, now picturing the two of them way back; the depressing flat with the barking dogs below, and the brothel above. Penny moving them back to Glasgow, and finding that first shop and, when that took off, somehow persuading a backer to fund the opening of further stores. And while I’d love to ask Nick more about his childhood – and his mother – I manage to hold back. I’m sure he’s been quizzed about his mum all his life.

‘How about you?’ Nick asks as I clear away our bowls.

‘Oh, I just have a bring-in-the-money sort of job at the moment.’

‘Right. What kind of work d’you do?’

And so I tell him about Flaxico, just the bare bones, with bunnygate dropped in as an attempt to raise my account of my working life from the humdrum.

‘That’s pretty major,’ he exclaims. ‘How d’you think it happened?’