Of all your designs, this is the one I loved the most – the foundry-boot-tap-shoe fusion. Polished applewood soles, percussive silvery blakeys tapping tempos, all fake flamenco and Flateley rhythms. Brass tack-spangled, red-laced, copper-capped. Useless in a foundry they’d let the hot metal sluice in through the eyelets, burn to the bone, but for dancing they were perfect, with their heavy weight swing, clear wooden knock. And I wanted to dance. With you. To step in time with you in your boots, think on my feet the way you did, skitter across a roof and jump to see what would happen, your umbrella in our hands to slow the fall.

I could see before I put them on that they were too small, but I put them on anyway. I had to. You cycled all the way from Stoke Newington to Waterloo in your own pair, laced with green leather, my new boots in the pockets of your tweed jacket, your umbrella held to the crossbar with a tie. On your baseball cap it said ‘the future is orange’. I squeezed my feet into the stiff leather and smiled, jigged about on the bare floor, swirling in tartan in the tiny kitchen til the neighbour downstairs hit her ceiling with a broom. And I kept them on as we emptied a bottle together on the sofa, and then another and the evening blurred. In the morning, the boots and I lay abandoned on the sitting room carpet. I wrapped the boots in the red kilt and put them away.

Every few years I come across them and force my feet in again, for a quick tap hop step, hoping they might have grown, or I might have shrunk, a very real possibility given the four decades I’ve held on to them. But all that’s changed is our age, and the patina of time has coloured us both dull. I consider, briefly, giving them away, but I never do.

I bumped into you again not long ago in town, near the pool at High Holborn. You in grey cords, pale green jumper, me in an old raincoat, my hair as grey as your trousers. I’m barely holding it together, you said, and scribbled your number and address on a paper napkin as we drank coffee in one of the Italian sandwich bars behind Smith’s Umbrella Shop.

I still have the boots you made me, I said. I’ll send you a picture.

I bet they’re still too small, you replied.

On the way home I wiped my eyes with the napkin and threw it in a bin.