We’ve all been seduced by a Pia – figures who come into our lives at a tentative age and promise to teach us what it is to grow up. I was 17, she was 18; though it may seem like a fickle gap, at that age the difference is splitting.

The world was staggering out of COVID and I felt I had skipped a whole chapter, growing up overnight without experience to fall back on. It bred a kinship with the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the 1920s: a generation equally shaped by upheaval and subsequent excess. The parallel felt seismic.