Want to know what you’re really like? Just ask the people who see you twice a year | Zoe Williams

Apparently, I’m the person who turns up soaking wet, sucking Haribos. Who needs lifelong friends who know you inside-out when acquaintances tell it like it is? The worst kind of professional relationship is with the person you see twice a year, in a variety of different locations, because whatever they notice about you from that tiny observational sample, that’s what you’re like. So on the first rainy day in folk memory, the opening bars of Storm Austen, I turned up to a job with a photographer, soaked.

I’d been on my bike and had tucked my trousers into my socks, so the accumulated water in the ankle area had seeped upwards, giving me a confusing wet leg-warmer effect, then a couple of dry inches, then an unbelievably wet rest of body. I was so wet that when I went to hug the studio’s labrador, he backed away from me like I was trying to give him a bath. “You were really wet last time! ” the photographer exclaimed, remembering our previous meeting back in March. “Well, it’s a wet country,” I replied, before the…