Sitting in the front row at the theatre (some Tudors-style nonsense play) I smiled broadly at an actress and she smiled back. We started chatting while the action took place elsewhere on stage. “Don’t I recognise you from that 1970s programme ‘The Brothers‘?”, I asked. “I used to love that”.

My new Polish boyfriend ran a smelting factory, but I couldn’t understand how it worked. Different lumps of metal, with paper labels stating their value, went into a portable furnace via a supermarket conveyor belt. Surely all this valuable paper-based information would be lost in the flames? The output of the process was called industrial ‘slunk’ and was apparently critical to the UK economy’s recovery.