‘But now you’re ready to get back into it!’ she said brightly, as if it was that easy, as if life were a series of choices taking us ever closer to total fulfilment.

And we could use the money, I thought.

But it seemed wrong to mention the need to earn a living. It seemed vulgar to mention the longing for legal tender to this young woman.

I gently replaced the needle on the final track of disc two, turning the volume way down to a respectable level. We listened to ‘When the Music’s Over’ for a while.

‘He sounds like Frank Sinatra,’ Skyla said.

‘Who does?’

‘Jim! I can imagine him singing “That’s Life”.’

I laughed. It was an astute thing to say. The world thought of Jim Morrison as a blues-based, crawling-king-snake rock god but it’s true there was always something of the Las Vegas crooner about that baritone.

‘So what are you writing?’ she said. She didn’t seem in a rush to get back to work.

‘A think piece, we used to call it. Back in the days when we used to think.’

‘For your old music paper?’

‘That ship has sailed. It was free, and then it went online, and then it died. There’s no more music press. I don’t know where this piece would go. I thought about trying to get it in my old national newspaper, but I know they’ve had a lot of budget cuts up there after losing so much of their advertising revenue.’

Skyla pulled a face. ‘Do a podcast,’ she said, and she made it sound like the most natural and easy thing in the world.

There were maybe ten years between us but she made me feel like a High Court judge peering over my reading spectacles.

‘And what is a podcast?’

‘M’Lud, a podcast is a series of digital audio episodes on the wireless …’

‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ I said.

‘But you’ve made a start already!’ she said. ‘Because you have something to say about something you care about. That’s the hard work done right there! The rest is just managing the tech, and that’s the easy bit. Maybe get a better microphone, download some free software and spend a weekend learning how to use it. Save your MP3 files. Edit.’ She nodded at the vinyl spinning on the record player. ‘Add the music. Find an online platform who will distribute it to streaming services like Spotify and iTunes.’

I felt like I should be writing this stuff down.

Skyla’s fingers were flying across her laptop, keen to show me something that explained how easy and perfect it was all going to be.

‘Ten million people listen to podcasts every week. There is a big growth in – you know – older listeners. My dad listens to podcasts and he’s like, fifty or something. No offence.’

I had to smile. ‘None taken.’

‘A classic rock music podcast is perfect,’ she said, with the kind of unequivocal enthusiasm that I guessed she brought to every working day, and I could understand why she was Tara’s last remaining employee. ‘I bet a lot of people would love to hear you talk about Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine and The Doors and Jim Morrison and play the music and share your passion with the world.’