I stood there for a moment, watching her neck, and her hair, and her shoulders, and yes, all right, I believe I may have glanced at her bottom.

‘So,’ Sarah said, taking a pace towards me. ‘You on the team?’

We looked at each other for a while, and then I smiled back, and shrugged, and started to say the word ‘well’, which is what I always do when I am stuck for words. And you’ll find, if you try this at home, that to form the ‘w’ sound, you have to pucker your lips into a kind of pout – very similar in shape to the one you’d use for whistling, say. Or, perhaps, even kissing.

She kissed me. She kissed me.

What I mean is, I was standing there, lips puckered, brain puckered, and she just stepped up and threw her tongue into my mouth. For a moment, I thought maybe she’d tripped on a floorboard and stuck out her tongue as a reflex – but that didn’t seem very likely somehow, and anyway, once she’d got her balance back, wouldn’t she have put her tongue away again ?