He lived in the flat above a friend of mine, 20 or more years ago. It was a block of serviced flats in South Kensington, London, one of those lonely, colourless buildings with a maroon-suited man on the desk, a cold lump of sculpture in the lobby and a lift which whisked you soundlessly from floor to floor.

It wasn’t the kind of place where real people lived and my friend, who was beginning to be a successful documentary maker but really only wanted to get married and have a load of babies, swore she wasn’t staying long. But she did stay, because it was that kind of place: a place where people accidentally spent years waiting for their real lives to start. Some died waiting. One evening as we ate supper we both watched through the window as a black van drew up, collected a human shaped, zipped-up bag, then drove away again. It was hard to carry on with our paella after that.