Overeducated and under-stimulated, Hera, twenty-four, finally admits that it is time, after three arts degrees, to leave education and get a job. Despite her determination to dress it up as research, an experiment to see if she can blend in without being recognised as ‘a chaotic fleshbag in a navy dress’, work turns out to be exactly as she expected. She is exasperated by her boring colleagues and tedious job: ‘I want to die but, devastatingly, this does not occur. I am very much alive, and I am sitting on a rolling chair.’ That is, until she spots Arthur and their office flirtation turns into an all-consuming affair.

The sardonic Hera becomes intoxicated by her feelings, abdicates all agency and patiently waits for him to divorce his wife, hoping ‘to snuggle in with him, into his life couch’. But we know, as Hera does deep down, that this isn’t going to happen. Arthur will never leave his wife.

Some