I recently agreed to meet a friend for lunch in Islington, at a new-ish restaurant that was serving Japanese pub food. We ate, drank, and fretted over the minutiae of each other’s’ lives like Olympia Dukakis and Cher in Moonstruck, grabbing greedy mouthfuls of fried pork cutlets and hamburger steaks between sentences while the sun cast a steady glow on the Kentish Town Road outside.