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There are things I want to say each time a friend tells me they have lost a parent. Not only a parent – also a friend, or a cat, or a job. The scale might look different, and grief is specific each time you experience it, but it is also the same.

What I would really like this International Women’s Day is a lot more days like the one I had last Wednesday. Because Wednesday was a beautiful thing - a whole day in which I was not interrupted.

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I thought I knew what I was in for. I’ve had plenty of CT scans and I imagined – based largely on television medical dramas – that an MRI would just be a bigger, more dramatic, full-body version of one of those.

As they looked around our house, their eyes lit up at the place we keep our music. “Ooh, CDs,” they said approvingly. “Very cool.”

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“Out by the pool, two middle-aged ladies arrive in what appear to be – and it takes me a moment to process this – matching outfits… One person sashaying poolside in that outfit would have been striking. Two were show stopping….”

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Last week I talked about my small town childhood terror of turning up to an A&P show overdressed – that whole “Who do you think you are?” jab from the local cool girls.

Back when I was a kid, the greatest fashion crime was to turn up somewhere overdressed…

If you’d ask me this time last year for my thoughts on football, our conversation would have been limited to my enthusiasm for the TV show, Ted Lasso. Favourite team: AFC Richmond. Favourite player: Jamie Tartt.