The afternoon was slowly fading into evening on Valentine’s Day in 2013 when Dean Harper’s phone began to buzz. On the line was a frantic voice in desperate need of some help. It was a football agent, the voice said, and he had a client who was in trouble.

“This footballer,” Harper says, “really wanted to impress his missus. He wanted to show off, I think, but he had really ballsed things up. He was trying to cook her a three-course dinner with some lamb, but had bought the wrong lamb. It was all chewy and he really panicked.”

Before he knew it, Harper was playing Cupid in the home of a Premier League athlete. “When I got there, there were things all over the kitchen and he just looked really distressed,” he remembers. “He was panicking about the table, and I think I really saved him.”

Harper, a private chef in the north-west, set about clearing up the mess and quickly crafted a five-course meal for the increasingly peckish lovebirds. “He started spraying perfume around the dining room,” he says. “I don’t know what that was about. He just said he wanted to spray a few scents.”