He sat on the arm of the chair rather than the seat, which always annoyed his mother.

‘I go out four motherfucking nights a week. I am in bars and parties and I′m not obese or revoltingly ugly. And yet I cannot meet a decent man. It′s just fucknuckle after fucknuckle, time after time...’

If I was acting particularly spacey, my mother would ask, “Are you stunod?”

But while he fielded questions at the makeshift podium, more exciting things were happening at his booth — not because of the designer’s industrial furniture or stage lighting (called, appropriately, A Bit of Rough) but owing to the fact that his boothettes were giving away gold lamé tote bags to a growing queue of visitors.