Friday night, P and I had separate engagements. I had a local party annual dinner, he was giving a concert with his madrigal group. We’d both arranged these events months ago, and it wasn’t until we thought to invite each other to the other one’s do that we realised we had a clash.

But the co-incidence came in that the two events were less than 100 metres from each other in a little North Notts village twenty miles north of here that neither of us had heard about until recently. He was in a singing in a church, and I was eating in a pub and listening to Lembit.