‘Please sit down,” I begged my neighbour, who was leaning across the car gearstick, arm stretched around my headrest. My pleas for him to fasten his seatbelt were futile. Now he was jigging about, gesticulating wildly as he revealed his latest plans.

He had told me before about the script he was writing for Gary Oldman. I hadn’t thought too much of it, then – all writers have to be a bit grandiose, I had reasoned, otherwise they wouldn’t achieve anything. But now he was telling me he was inventing a flying machine, from which he would fall – and I quote – “like a sycamore seed”. “You very much won’t,” my partner muttered. “What goes up, must come down.”

That morning, he had arrived at our door with an extensive shopping list that he demanded we procure for him from Tesco, saying that only the very best red wine would do. Caught off-guard by this bristling confidence, we’d compromised and offered a taxi service instead. At the supermarket, it transpired he had no money – we didn’t have much either – so we got what we could afford and went home, trying to make our new friend promise he would not attempt the flying stunt anytime soon. I wish I could write that we did more to support him. We were young and barely supporting ourselves. The neighbour became very quiet after that, and eventually moved.

Some years later, I thought of him. It was a fleeting recollection, like all my thinking at that point. I looked in the mirror, and instead of hating my reflection, as I had for the months previously, I was suddenly glowing with........

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