A play, a pie, and a pint was so heavily advertised that all Edinburgh seemed to have gathered at the Festival Theatre for the first performance of the season. I feared that TPR and I would lose one another in the huge crowd.

I was right to be concerned. I was ages in the ladies – partly due to the length of the queue, partly due to a battle with the shower attachment in the disabled cubicle. The audience numbers had grown so large in this time that I couldn’t see TPR at our agreed meeting spot afterwards. It was impossible to use our mobile phones to locate one another because there was no signal in the building.

I didn’t feel like battling the hordes to find my seat in the auditorium, so instead I headed home. Along the way I met TF. He too had lost his partner LF in the crush. We were so delighted to have found a friend (if not our partners) that we shared our relief in the most passionate of embraces.