ONE AFTERNOON IN late July 2003 I turned up at a café in Brunswick Street Fitzroy to have coffee with a man. I carried, for reasons still partly obscure to me, a small orange case – a child’s reinforced cardboard 1950s school bag – and arrived several minutes late.

The man I was to meet had told me over the phone that he would be carrying a ‘crumpler’, which I did not at that point realise was a brand of satchel, and I, flustered, had told him I would carry this bag, which I was now half regretting. As I neared the café, trying to look composed, I saw a man sitting in the window seat. When I looked towards him, he raised a stripy bag into the air, and I, in response, raised my orange case.