She stands beside the counter, carefully poised, her flame hair restrained with pleats and a pin. Her warm figure is held down with a military-style jacket, buttoned and belted. Her make-up is pristine and the angle of her head is perfectly untouchable. There is a simmering glamour here, a lady of the French Resistance, disciplined but not tame.

I wonder if this should be comical, this character in a pharmacy who sells nail varnish and dispenses prescriptions with a precision that is, somehow, too precise to be real. Miltaristic. Feline. It isn’t comical; she owns that pharmacy, manifestly if not actually. But she’s leaving, I hear - today her last day - and it amazes me that any pharmacy could possibly survive without this artfully poised wild-cat at the counter.