At dinner, I'm the one who's actually listening. You'll notice around the second course, when you realise you've said more than you meant to and liked it.

I spend enough time near the inner sanctum to know that the real decisions get made over lunch and announced in the meeting. I'm an anthropologist with a big appetite: I have theories about the ways people order a drink, argue, and flirt. I'll trade you Paris for wherever you're from, and we'll both forget there's a menu.

Everyone has an origin story. At sixteen I found Delta of Venus — erotica that Anaïs Nin wrote in the 1940s — and I took it very seriously. Seriously enough that I've made most of my mistakes on purpose. I'm bisexual, and what it's mostly taught me is that desire is a language: everyone speaks it with an accent, and I’m told mine’s charming.

I can be fatally indulgent. Take me to Madrid and I'll vanish into a 500-year-old painting of a thousand tiny sinners having the time of their lives — all that gluttony and joyful excess — until they turn the lights off. I’ll come back with all kinds of ideas. I’m the same way about music, and about dinner. I don't believe in highbrow and lowbrow. I believe in whether the thing is alive.

I'm easy company and hard to impress, and I suspect you'd prefer it that way. That's not to say I'm hard to move. Get the light right and the champagne cold, say one true thing without meaning to, and I'll fall a little in love with the whole night and everyone in it.

I'm not here for a rehearsal, I’m here for the things I haven't done yet.

That's me. Your turn.