Immanuel Kant believed that people laughed at constructions like these because ‘(L)aughter is an effect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing’. Quirtell disagrees. ‘Laughter is an effect that arises if a race refuses to grow up,’ she writes.

All in all they were the most embarrassing minutes of my life so far, even beating the moments Mum spent getting out the baby photographs the first time I brought a girlfriend (Katy Wallace, it lasted three weeks) home to meet the folks.

I discovered that there is a huge difference between knowing a few jokes and being a stand-up comic. I don’t think I got a single gag right. I fluffed a punch line early on and then made a mistake in the set-up of the next joke that made its punch line irrelevant. Sweating on the makeshift stage, with hundreds of faces staring at me, I dried up and just looked out at them in the grip of a huge panic attack.

I haven’t entered the talent show since.

I rarely drag myself along for it, if I’m honest. I always seem to find something else to do. Like pairing socks, or cataloguing my comics.

You know, important stuff.

‘You will come and watch?’ Danny asked, and there was a note of something close to desperation in his voice. ‘You will, won’t you?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ Lilly said, finally dragging her gaze away from the area of Simon’s neck it had been focused on for most of Danny’s ‘I’m a hypnotist’ revelation.

I nodded.

A part of me even wanted to see Danny do well. To knock ’em dead. Become the talk of the village. Maybe even get his picture in the Cambridge Evening News.

But there was another part of me – and I’m not proud of this – that actually wanted to see him fail.

Miserably, horribly and painfully.

It would be like exorcising a ghost.

It would be like therapy.

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘I’ll be there.’

Lilly looked at me oddly and a strange expression passed across her face, like a cloud across the sun. I had a sudden sense of discomfort, as if Lilly had seen – or maybe felt – something that I should have seen or felt but didn’t.