conversation, he learned where I lived, and that I lived alone. In Swiss apartment blocks the mail boxes were normally on the ground floor, and each bore the residents’ names, and their flat numbers and floors, so it was easy for him to find me once he had the number of my entrance. Which he did soon afterwards.

On this day, I was on my own, and probably on my third "Love Machine" (my ex-lover M’s name for a vodkatini-on-the-rocks-with-a-twist). I was playing a Cat Stevens disc, no doubt still vinyl at this stage. The door bell rang. I let Joe in and he immediately decided I was kosher if I liked Cat, because he did too.

Indeed, a week later, he gave me a disc by the then cute Greek-turned-Muslim, which I did not have. Can’t remember the title, but it had a brilliant track of a song in Latin on it, which I played over and over again. Oh yes! It’s come back - the song and the disc were called O! Caritas! (O! Love!)

Once I had served Joe a drink, he put it down and started dancing to the music, then pulled me up to join him. No dancer I, this was nevertheless an occasion when I acquitted myself respectably. Suddenly he stopped and said to me, in French (our lingua franca):

Je sais ce que tu veux, et tu vas l’avoir un de ces jours. Ça m’est déjà arrivé plusieurs fois, et toujours avec les hommes plus agés. Mais cela ne sera pas ce soir.

That is to say:

I know what you want, and you’ll have it one of these days. It’s already happened to me a number of times, and always with older men. But it won’t be tonight.

Well, I don’t know what you would have done, but I just hugged him and said: I’ll wait, baby. He called out of the blue numerous times over the months and years, even inviting me to his son’s baptism, but "it" never happened.

Until, that is, his marriage ran into problems - clash of personalities, I think; he was a galiego (from Galicia in the north), while she came from (you’ve got to believe this) Kodak in Andalusia, not far from Almeria, on the Costa del Sol. It was a place used for making spaghetti (or should that be paella) Westerns.

So a row would break out between them and, in his macho way, he would storm out leaving her with the kids (there was now a whingeing daughter as well). Quite often, one of his ports of call would be my place, and if I was there he’d stay and get drunk - or drunker. He only drove a moped, so it wasn’t very risky, though he did have a fall or two.

On one of these occasions he was bemoaning his fate, and how he wished he had never got married. I reasoned with him, and tried to get him to phone his wife, to let her know he was alive (he’d been AWOL for a couple of days by then) but he wouldn’t hear of it. “Let her suffer“, he said. Things went on a bit this time - it was about two years since we had first danced to Cat Stevens - and eventually he asked if he could stay the night.

This was the first time, and I wondered if it was just because he was pissed out of his mind, and didn’t want to face the wife,