When we were 19, my best friend and I promised that if we were both single at 60, we’d find each other — I turned 60 last Tuesday, and my old landline rang.

I’m not sorry I kept him. I am sorry nobody asked you anything.

I’m not sorry I kept him. She wrote that to me and she was right to.

What we had.

Four days.

Tuesday evening to Saturday morning.

We did not say anything enormous. That is what surprises people.

We talked about the bakery, and a teacher called Mr Ivor who neither of us had thought about since 1983, and whether the chip shop by the bridge was still there, which it is not.

On the Wednesday he made me read the cards out loud to him, in order, because he could not hold them and because, he said, he had never once heard them.

Forty-one birthday cards. Most of them say almost nothing. Happy birthday, Lornie. Hope it’s a good one. G. Year after year after year.

The 1997 one has a whole paragraph in it about a job he had been offered in another town, which he did not take.