This is the story.

Kim Le Bouedec and I run the Finchley Mint. And I’ve just kissed his wife.

We sell die-cast model cars by mail order. Don’t laugh, it’s a serious business. We always knew, Kim and I, in the years he was at Credit Suisse and I was bumping around the Home Counties in a maroon Vauxhall Insignia, urging skeptical Pakistani pharmacists to stock Dr. Schoepke’s Dynamic Night Conditioner, that we’d end up working together. Our kind of friendship, a perpetual suspension of unctuous love and vinegar, has always made for fun, and for efficiently nuanced exchanges,…