I remembered that I had agreed to catch up with LM at 4:30pm, but I had forgotten to check the venue of our meeting.

I was shocked when I saw in her Facebook message that we were to meet in Smeaton. I hadn’t even heard of this place! When I checked the map, I saw that Smeaton was miles away across the other side of the city, and that it would be impossible to reach LM in time.

I tried to call LM to cancel our get-together, but the phone that I was using was absolutely hopeless. It was a landline model from the 1980s, recommissioned as a ‘mobile phone’ having been wrenched out of the soil, clods of which were still attached to the bottom. Out of its top grew a small shrub. There was even a tiny cassette tape inserted into its base to take primitive ‘voicemail’.

Ultimately I was unsuccessful in my attempts to contact LM.  She would be very worried about my health when she eventually realised that I was not going to turn up as arranged.