It depends on the school I’m being a visiting author at, and it depends very much on the pupils, but when I’ve got a whole day with the same group, I like to have them change what we’re going to do in the afternoon. I’ve always got a plan, I wouldn’t waste their time turning up without one, but by around the end of the morning, they’re hopefully into it and I definitely have a sense of what they can do.

So while I’ll keep some of the same skeleton structure of the afternoon, I run an exercise that results in them having named broad genres like horror, comedy, romance, thriller, fantasy, you get the idea.

The last couple of times I’ve done this, we’ve then had a vote on which of these we will use for the afternoon and it is shocking to me how often they go for horror. That’s actually quite a tricky one because I’ve had some gruesome tales come out of these writers. But I also get to amuse myself by getting them to vote by raising their hand. I’ll count the two who vote for romance, then I’ll count the overwhelming majority who’ve voted for horror, and I will pretend it’s really close. Or I’ll express surprise because I thought they were going to choose horror and yet here they are, every single pupil mad-keen to write romance.

“Well, if you’re sure you want to write romance…” I say, to roars of laughter. It’s really a treat to be laughed at sometimes.

Anyway, we seem to always end up writing horror.

But as we go around the votes, I have sometimes told them honestly that my favourites are romance and thrillers — and that I don’t really distinguish between them. I don’t go into detail, nobody there is interested in what I like to write, but if I were to ponder aloud, I’d would be thinking something like this. You’re not likely to die in a romcom, but in real life you can want the ground to open up and chew on you if she or he says no.

In a thriller, everything changes, everything turns, on the moment you are or are not caught. In a romance, everything changes, everything turns, on the moment you ask the question. In that moment, you are wide-open vulnerable, the real you is exposed and there is no circumstance in which everything will ever be the same again. Good or bad, what you had before is over.

I find that electrifying and I have believed entirely that this is why I am arrested by romances and romcoms.

Only…

Last Wednesday night, I watched “Met Someone”, an episode of the 1990s US romance sitcom “Mad About You”, written by Danny Jacobson. There was tension, but this was a flashback episode to where two characters met, two characters who we’ve already been following as a married couple for ten episodes. I imagine if it were the first episode you saw, things would be different, but after ten weeks with this couple, it is impossible to doubt the outcome when they meet.

And yet you do.

You find yourself rooting for the two to get together, fully aware that yes, of course they do. In a 22-minute running time, complete with such jokes that I remember them 30 years after first seeing this episode, Jacobson writes what I think is a perfect romance. The speed of it, somehow you know it is all hyper-fast but it doesn’t feel like it. I just had to go check the running time to be sure, it uses its time so exquisitely well.

You can see the importance of this moment for these characters, you can see every beat on their faces. What you can’t do, though, is see the episode. To my knowledge, it’s not streaming anywhere, or at least not in the UK, and I got to see it only because I have the DVDs.

I don’t have a DVD player anymore, or not one I can find, but I long ago ripped my DVDs onto my Mac and use Plex to stream the video from there to my living room TV.

Which you might argue is too much detail, is something you don’t need to know, but at least you can get Plex, I’m not being entirely useless. Not entirely, no.