They were sitting side by side. They had been there for nearly an hour, the rain sluicing over the windows, putting the rest of the world into soft focus. There was no chance of leaving this place in the next hour; the rain would not let up and they were trapped in. As they were in separate cars in this particular traffic jam, they’d not yet managed to strike up a conversation.

It’s hard to determine if you’ve made eye contact with someone when the glass of your car window is covered in running water, which distorts and disguises what’s beyond. Neither of them was sure that the other was really glancing their way. Nothing in the book of dating etiquette seems to describe what to do when you may or may not be subject to a case of mutual admiration between vehicles in a traffic jam.

Eventually, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, Simon waved. At first he thought he’d misread the situation, that the girl he’d been smiling at and sneaking glances at for the last hour wouldn’t respond. Then, with a giggle, Lucy waved back. As soon as the tension was broken, they couldn’t act quickly enough. Simon opened the window of his car, allowing the rain to have its way and slowly, but effectively, drench the right hand side of his body. He motioned for Lucy to do the same. Lucy had other ideas. In the slight mist that had formed on her passenger-side window, she wrote her mobile phone number, backwards.

As they checked into the Travelodge, a couple of hours and a very long chat later, asking for separate rooms, Simon couldn’t help but marvel on how unlikely a meeting theirs had been, and how amazing it was to meet a woman so practical and so able to write neatly in reverse. Lucy, on the other hand, was wondering whether it would be possible to use the pretext of Simon’s soaked shirt as a way of getting it off him, and soon.