On Clémentine’s last night we go to see a French band we both like play at a little venue near Old Street, dark with people smoking the occasional illicit cigarette, the kind of place where the owners don’t care, and everyone misses the days before the ban, when we couldn’t see each other clearly through the smoke, but perhaps we felt things more intensely as a result. It is a sit-down-and-listen kind of place, and we grab a table not too far from the front and drink our beers in the close, companionable heat. The lead singer has a voice like a woodwind, a warmly timbred alto, and when the band begins to play a Cowboy Junkies cover of a Velvet Underground song I dissolve into some liquid version of myself mixed with world, with the warm bentwood chair I’m sitting in, with the scuffed mosaic floor, with the French singer who is slightly out of place in London, dépaysée, with the husky insistent bass guitar, with Clémentine, who slips an arm around the back of my chair. Her arm isn’t touching me, but I am encircled by her, by the music.

By the time the singer reaches that heart-healing end of the song, as the guitarist slides through the never not surprising chords of the bridge, notes of bright acidity in the otherwise warm liquid of the music, I have, quite simply, arrived elsewhere, gone further than Old Street, been transported back to a place I haven’t been in a very long time, felt feelings of safety and origin I thought had escaped me forever. Or maybe, in fact, I am somewhere I have never, ever been.