During one of the worst years of my childhood, my mum returned from a hospital stay literally wreathed in pain. She’d had a hysterectomy, but something had gone wrong at the end of the operation and all I really remembered from that Winter was constantly turning up the music on my walkman to drown out the sounds of her sobbing in the bathroom. It was a grim, terrifying time: being an only child, you have a certain amount of fear tied up in the fact that there’s really just the two of you: my nan was a borderline alcoholic, and could really only be relied upon to provide unpredictable problems whenever she came back from the pubs.
