And often you’re absolutely right, it’s not who you thought it was, it’s just someone who looks a little like them and you’re relieved that you didn’t call out their name.

Or feel like a total ass because you did.

When Danny walked out I had the same thing happen inside my brain. I mean I knew it was Danny, but then I doubted it and had to look again.

It wasn’t just that he’d got himself a smart dinner suit that actually fitted him – although that helped. It wasn’t that his usually random-angled hair had been gelled and slicked back – although that helped too.

It was something that was both of those things, plus something else.

‘He looks older,’ Lilly said, almost breathlessly, and Simon laughed at her comment.

He was wrong to laugh.

It was true.

Danny did look older.

Taller, too, because he’d lost his habitual slump.

And his face had an intensity to it that made him look a whole lot wiser than the kid who was the constant butt of our stupid jokes.

He stood in the middle of the stage as helpers lined up four chairs behind him. He was looking out across the audience with a confident expression that seemed spooky on a kid his age, almost as if we were seeing a glimpse of Danny as he was going to be, twenty or so years in the future.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said calmly and commandingly. ‘Welcome to my demonstration of the powers of the human mind.’

He unbuttoned his jacket and reached for the inside breast pocket, pulling out a brand new deck of cards. He took them from their box, cracked the seal and removed the cellophane, then mixed them up with a series of overhand shuffles.

Danny was a master with a pack of cards – he practised card magic in front of his bedroom mirror – and I was suddenly afraid that he had bottled out of his hypnotism act in favour of some more of what he’d been doing at the talent show for the last couple of years.