My last chance as a crappy business journalist began and ended with my assignment to the oil rich jungle state of Chiapas in southern Mexico. I was heading there to report on the prospects of revolution and its possible impact on investment in the oil industry. So seeing Alejo de Tolejdes’s name on an internet list of Mexico’s most prominent oil executives filled me with a number of feelings. Nostalgia, certainly. Pain, yes – even after ten years I held Alejo responsible for messing up what I considered to be one of my great unfinished love affairs. Yet… Alejo might actually be a good contact to have in Chiapas; he might help me to make a success of what my boss had said would be my last “bite of the banana” unless I got a scoop. Thinking about Alejo led inevitably to thoughts about Lucy, my girlfriend at the time I had first known him. In fact, sitting there with Alejo’s still blasé, rich and arrogant face smirking back at me from my office computer screen I felt completely odd. Considering whether or not to email him so much of what had happened ten years previously in all of its tragic enormity span back into my awareness with an intensity quite as arresting as it was unexpected.