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‘Each presentation. That way, we can also score the individual presenters.’

‘Have you got any examples you can share? I like to add them to my DCB.’

‘DCB?’

‘Officially, it’s my Disallowed Catchphrase Book, but it’s also known as the Dictionary of Corporate Bollocks.’

‘Aren’t you rather playing into the whole corporate thing by giving it a three-letter-acronym, though?’

‘Oh, absolutely, but that’s half the fun of it. Anyway, hit me with some phrases.’

I cast my mind back to the company meeting a couple of weeks ago.

‘Well, there’s leveraging synergies,’ I tell him, trying to remember as much of the presentations as possible, ‘but also blue-sky thinking; aiming for the low-hanging fruit; don’t try to boil the ocean. That kind of thing.’

He grins. ‘I’ve already got all of them, along with “getting down where the rubber meets the road” and “learning by the fire hose”.’

‘What does that even mean?’

‘It means presenting your audience with such a deluge of information in a short time that they’re instantly overwhelmed, a bit like trying to drink from a fire hose.’

‘I think you can keep that one. Our new head of sales is obsessed by his “go-to-market stradigies”.’

‘That’s a terrible phrase.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘If I had my way,’ he says as he starts to pick the pace back up again, ‘I’d ban all of that. It’s just meaningless drivel.’

‘What would you say instead?’

‘Just use plain English. Instead of “blue-sky thinking”, for example, you could simply say “thinking creatively” or “being imaginative”.’

‘You know what you are? You’re an office killjoy,’ I pant. ‘How are you supposed to play lingo-bingo with phrases like that?’

‘My point exactly,’ he retorts with a laugh. ‘You’d have to listen to what the person was actually saying, which is kind of the point of a presentation.’

‘And this is what you do?’

‘It’s part of what I do, yes.’

‘So what are you working on at the moment, or is it a secret?’

‘No secret. I’m working with a call centre.’

‘I thought they were mainly based in India.’

‘A lot are, but African countries are popular too because wages are similarly low.’

We’ve come to the waterfront and slow naturally to a stop, looking out across the sea.

‘So, your breakthrough…’ Nathan prompts after a minute or two.

‘One of the men at the company I’m working with started by saying something that I considered incredibly inappropriate but, rather than complaining or calling him out, I went with it. We ended up having this very strange conversation where he was basically saying I’d better make the most of the weekend because he’d have me on the first plane home if I didn’t deliver the goods next week, and I was asking for recommendations just in case. I’d been told he’s something of a wine buff, so I also asked him about that, which gave him the opportunity to showcase his knowledge. I wouldn’t say we’re completely out of the woods, but I think we have a tentative ceasefire. I’m going to follow up on some of his suggestions over the weekend, mainly so I’ll have something to talk to him about to soften him up before I hit him with the fairly basic retail concepts that I suspect will blow his mind and hopefully make him realise that I do actually know my stuff.’

Our conversation is interrupted by the arrival of a man trying to sell us bags of what look like more used biros so, after politely declining, we turn and start heading back towards the apartment block. Nathan is carefully regulating the speed to stop me from getting too breathless, and it soon becomes clear why.

‘Would these recommendations include visiting any vineyards?’ he asks.