Honestly, though, even the dog trick usually fails. “Just imagine: if you flew private, the dog could go with you on every trip,” I will add, knowing that this is the one thing that, at a weak moment, might just get him. During any envy outburst, he will remind me that we seem to have our health and definitely have a dog. He’s one of those people who is happy with his life and recognises what good fortune we have. If you have my bad habit, the last thing you want to hear from beyond the changing-room curtain is someone hollering, “But ask yourself: are they happy?” That’s usually my other half’s response. When you meet someone who is thrustingly successful and seems to have an existence of endless calm, do you ever take their life to your mental changing room and quickly try it on to see whether it would look good on you too? It’s especially tempting to do this if they are roughly the same age as you – and even tougher to resist if you knew them in your youth, when they amounted to little, but now their business prowess and associated wealth are the stuff of newspaper headlines.

And his picture captions are all about the need to be connected, present and in the moment (by which I take it that he has a private jet). He seems to spend a lot of time at yoga retreats, holding those difficult poses that only yogis and the very rich have time to perfect – less full plank, more full bank. I think the accounts that he was probably referring to were of the social-media variety because I had a look at our old acquaintance’s Instagram account and there were numerous shots of him looking lean, tanned and at ease. “He sold his company 10 years ago for a stack of money and now just leads a very nice life, by all accounts,” he said. Unfortunately, my friend knew all the details. “Whatever happened to him?” I wondered aloud. I was talking to a friend when the name of someone who we had both known well a long time ago came up.

White Heat by Autumn Jones Lake