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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.