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In the video, my hair is loosely pinned with paintbrushes and falls in spirals around my face. When I wore it down, people said I looked like Lorde circa ‘Royals,’ but I was going for a young Helena Bonham Carter meets season one Phoebe Buffay. I wore striped tights, vintage dresses and an excessive amount of silver jewellery, creating an eclectic aesthetic that I deemed entirely unique.

But it was a long time ago. Now, I squat half-naked and sweaty and swallow tepid white wine as the video loads. I’ve scrolled to the bottom of RIOT 1.5’s account, to one of our earliest posts. In it, the rosy idealism of youth sparkles in my eyes, and I am reminded of all those bright young things outside Number 10. Except back then, we could make our voices heard without the threat of police brutality. I’m wearing silver-framed full-moon glasses perched on a greasy button nose, and my cheeks are flush with pencilled-on freckles.

We’re in Irie’s conservatory at East Peace – a greenhouse turned events space that she offered to the community in exchange for gardening volunteers. The conservatory was host to friendship circles, needle-felting workshops and pumpkin-carving classes, but Ed’s climate group was the first of its kind there. The video was shot in the winter, when the handful of people who showed up were dwarfed by Irie’s collection of dormant geraniums. Come summer, we’d turned that half a dozen into fifty and spilled out onto the grass where we tried in earnest to be the change we wanted to see in the world. But for now, there were six of us. The camera pans around a well-worn farmhouse table.

‘Tell us what’s happening, Ed,’ the person behind the camera says.

‘We’re making placards for the climate march,’ Ed replies moderately, casting his arm over an array of flattened cardboard boxes and paint pots. He’s clean-shaven and looks like an NPC. This was before he discovered the antiestablishment style of a seasoned activist, when he was still sporting the short back and sides of boyhood and wore blue jeans all the time. But despite his nondescript appearance, Ed’s brown eyes were deep-set with determination.

‘Join us at Whitehall at twelve tomorrow,’ he says to the camera, then looks to me for reassurance. I nod my encouragement. ‘It’s time to tell the government that enough is enough – we need climate actionnow.’

There is a sheepish murmur of approval from the group. I smile and put my arm around him, thrilled with myself. My following was barely breaking a couple of thousand back then, and Travis was just a shadow in my comment section, yet I’m holding myself with the self-assuredness of a star on the rise. The shot focuses in on the placard I’m making. It saysTHE OCEANS ARE RISING AND SO ARE WE– a phrase I’d stolen from someone else – yet I’m grinning like I’ve just designed the next BLM fist.

I don’t relate to this woman at all, to thisgirl. She’s too readily perceived. She doesn’t cover her mouth when she laughs, allowing a wad of pink gum to devour her upper lip and ruin her otherwise-acceptable face. But most pathetic of all, she thinks we actually stand a chance to change things.

‘That’s great, baby,’ Ed says, leaning in to look at my placard. Our heads knit together, and he asks me what colour he should use on his. We opt for green, though I ended up painting it for him. He was never any good at that sort of thing. I was, as it turned out. I designed the RIOT 1.5 T-shirt he’s wearing in the video. It’s one of the ways I made my mark: not just by creating a logo but by convincing Ed that we needed one in the first place. He founded the Climate Change Prevention and Democracy Preservation Society at university and was committed to its deeply uninspiring name, calling itcredibleandpragmatic. I had a hunch that pragmatism was not the way to grow a movement, and when we moved to London to do just that, I made it my mission to get him to change his mind.

‘But what are we rioting about?’ he’d asked the day I suggested changing the name to RIOT. It was the first time we’d used Irie’s conservatory, and he was stooped over the farmhouse table like an army general planning an invasion. ‘It can’t just be anything, Fi. We need to be more specific.’

That’s when we landed on RIOT 1.5, a name that both suited Ed’s wonkish leanings – referencing the need to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees – and my eye for catchy branding. It’s what made us the perfect team. He had the facts and figures; I knew how to make things look good. He studied environmental sciences at the University of Edinburgh; I studied Photoshop hac