Among my fondest recent memories — not just of the time before the pandemic, but of that strange time when it seemed like we were winning — was a visit with a group of friends to the Peckhamplex in south-east London, in 2018. We were there to see Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, a ticket for which cost less than the price of a beer in the many eateries of the “Peckham Levels” that stand above this basement cinema in a converted 1980s car park.

At the end of this astonishing, freewheeling, and, for what it’s worth, strictly Marxist science fiction comedy, the young, working-class audience that this cinema is so rare in catering to spilled out onto the street; around Peckham Rye station old-school communist graffiti graced the underside of the railway bridge. What a time to be alive, I thought to myself.

Being chronically ill, advancing rapidly toward middle age, and already a little sedentary, I wasn’t missing activities that I didn’t do anyway (clubs, gyms, zoos) for most of 2020, but I badly missed the cinema, and especially, cinemas like this one.