“Just kiss her,” he said, gesticulating passionately, “if you want to kiss her, you should do it.”

We were standing at the bus stop, waiting for the number thirteen to drag us up the hill and homewards. Well, they were standing at the bus stop. I was opposite them, outside a newsagents, standing, eavesdropping with a bag of vegetables in one hand and a bunch of bright pink and orange gerberas in the other - my present to myself for surviving Wednesday. They were only a metre away, deep in earnest conversation, and I was transfixed.

“It’s like bungee jumping, you know? You just have to put your feet together, clench your fists and do it. You can’t worry about what will happen. You should just go for it,” he enthused.

He was tall and lanky, with small round glasses and a close cap of thick curls. His hands moved quickly when he talked, and he shuffled from one foot to the other, as if dancing. His thick Israeli accent sounded loud in the Swiss Cottage air - pungent and appealing and strange, like Balti spices in the Pennines. He rolled his Rs and made “go for it” sound like gohferrrreeth. I wrapped my mouth silently around his pronounciation of the word. It felt funny.

“I took too long to kiss my girlfriend,” he continued “I should have kissed her sooner.” He drew out the Es and Is of his words, so each kiss became a much more prolongued affair - keeeeess.

His friend laughed. He was shorter, shrugged inside a baggy outdoorsy jacket, propped up on one bent leg against the bus shelter.

“I can’t,” he began. He was Canadian - you could tell by the accent, and then, with the benefit of hindsight, it all clicked into place - the short cropped hair. The jacket. The good teeth and the knapsack. “I want to, I think she wants me to, but I just don’t think it’s time…”

The tall Israeli snorted in derision. “It’s never the right time. I waited too long to kiss my girlfriend,” he gushed, “I was in love with her before I kissed her,” Love, pronounced loaf, “and when I finally did it, I knew I’d waited too long…”

“Why’s that?” asked the Canadian, giving voice to the question I so wanted to ask.

“Because,” he explained, softening the word until it became bicosss, “I realised I’d missed so many opportunities, because I waited too long. I wanted to kiss her forever, and as soon as I realised I’d waited a week to kiss her, I realised it would always be forever,” forever with a double f: foreffah, “minus one week. I lost a week of forever because I waited. Don’t lose a week, man.”

The bus came quickly and I lost them in the crowd. But I thought about them the whole way home.