It’s a late summer’s evening, 1981.

I’m standing in the queue for The Prom. It’s a long queue, several blocks long. Sun on South Kensington. I don’t even know what they’re playing tonight or who’s playing. Being here is enough. After two years in the depths of Dorset, I’m finally moving to London.

She’s reading a book, she’s on her own: two things I notice. She’s also fifteen yards ahead of me in the queue and engrossed in that book, which gives me ample opportunity, over a full forty minutes, to fall in love with her.

But I’m twenty four and I’ve fallen in love many times, perhaps several times that day.

It’s the interval. As a promenader (£5 in), I’ve chosen to stand on the balcony that circles the Albert Hall auditorium a long way up. And there she is, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall. That book again.

Above her: an emergency exit sign. The lighting in the word ‘exit’ is broken. But ‘emergency’ is lit. Emergency. Emerge.

I’ve sat down beside her. I haven’t thought about this but I’m there. “We managed to get in then”, I say. She looks up at me blankly. “Long queue?”, I mutter. “Yes”, she says. There’s an accent.

She’s French, she’s a student, she’s been working in London for six months and she’s been coming to the Prom every night. This is the last. She goes home tomorrow.

We stand together in the second half. Janacek’s Sinfonietta. That brassy fanfare: for beginnings, for hope, written at the birth of the Czechoslovak republic after the First World War. And after the concert we sit for two hours in Regent’s Park. I’m moving to London in a week, it’s a summer’s evening, and I’m sitting out in the park in the thrumming city dark, talking to a French girl.

Who’s leaving tomorrow.

We write to each other for six months. In the spring of the following year, 1982, she comes back to England and gives me an LP: The Rite of Spring. We spend April together. We spend the summer together, in County Kerry, in Prague. In the autumn she visits twice and I take the photos of her, that I still have in a battered plastic album in the bookcase. I know which shelf it’s on.

In the winter I break up with her without knowing why.