‘Sir John Mills?’

‘Won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Ryan’s Daughter? No? Before your time. But it’s brilliant, isn’t it? Be sincere, be brief and be seated. When the nerves are kicking in, and a room full of faces are staring up at me waiting for me to say something interesting or enlightening or entertaining, I remind myself of those lines.’

I couldn’t imagine him being nervous before making a speech.

‘James Caine,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘And I already know your name.’

I shook his hand, slid onto the seat next to him and ordered a draught Kirin. He was drinking some kind of complicated cocktail with fruit in it.

‘And did it work?’ he said.

‘I never had a standing ovation before,’ I said. ‘So I guess it must have worked.’

‘I meant your friend – Ginger. Did your business do the trick for her? Did you manage to find her someone?’

The someone was well judged. He didn’t say true love. He didn’t say a man. He didn’t try to make light of it or to dismiss her loneliness – and Ginger was very lonely when she first came to London, she was lonely for years – as somehow trivial. I liked that a lot.

‘Ginger found someone,’ I said. ‘She’s married now. To Spike.’

‘Spike?’

‘Not his real name. At least I don’t think it’s his real name. But – ironically enough – it had nothing to do with me. He was another Aussie in London and they met in the gym. The old-school way.’

‘But your company took off,’ he said, raising his cocktail glass in salute.

I smiled. It was easy to be modest about my business success.

‘Tinder are not losing any sleep about us just yet. But there are a lot of wonderful women out there on their own, men too. It’s five years now and we have been turning a small profit for three and a bit. I didn’t think we would last so long.’

‘What’s your secret?’

‘A good idea with low overheads. If you keep the costs down, all you need is a web designer, someone to answer the phones and your good idea. And we’re hard on catfishing.’

‘Catfishing?’

‘Catfishing is the plague of all online dating. People pretending to be something they’re not. You know – the fifty-year-old man pretending to be twenty-five. The man with a wife and ten kids pretending to be young, free and single. The men who take off their wedding rings on a date. And women catfish too, though nowhere near as much as the men. We’re one of the few dating apps that gets clients to upload a passport or a driving licence. You need photo ID to join a library, so why shouldn’t you need it to join a dating agency?’

‘But how does that stop people pretending they still look like their fifteen-year-old profile pictures? Or Brad Pitt? And how does it stop them fibbing about their marital status?’