I was about eight minutes in, with his on the concrete beside me steaming, when a shadow came across the pavement and a man said:

“Excuse me — anybody sitting there?”

He had a canvas rucksack with one strap gone and a rolled sleeping mat and he was maybe sixty.

And my hand went into my bag.

Straight in, without any instruction from me, going for my purse, because there is a thing I have been doing since I was about twenty-four in which a man asks me a question on a street and my hand is in my bag before he has finished the sentence.

And I stopped it.