When we left the cottage in Noss Mayo that morning I was beautiful. I had always been beautiful, I was used to it. Some people are good at bridge, some good at painting, writing, playing football, sailing, teaching. I was good at being beautiful. It was effortless, it was what was the case, morning, noon and night. I never had to try. I looked in the mirror and there was my face, clear and seductive. I knew that. I knew it when I was twelve. My beauty wasn’t dependent on other conditions, it was a given, something that worked to my advantage. When that speck of Semtex blew I was looking in the mirror of a compact, checking the line of my lipstick and the world shattered. So did the mirror and every piece of glass in a two-mile radius. As the glass blew in, I felt nothing (of course, you don’t feel much when glass cuts). Then my eyes filled with blood.

But that was a long time ago. It all happened so long ago. I’ve written about this so often. I sit here on this deck, writing, whisky burbling down my throat, because I can’t think of what else to do. I remember pointing, more than thirty years ago, to this house whenever John and I went for a day trip and saying, 'I'd give anything to have that house.’ Remembering that reminds me of the story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’. My mother must have told me that story decades ago. I didn’t realise then what I would have to give up to get this house. ‘I’d give anything to have …’

Be very, very careful what you wish for.

I don’t know, I don’t know. I’ve tried hard, so very hard, to do all the right things and yet I know I’ve achieved little. It’s difficult to live a life of two halves — first the sparkling, stunning social ingenue and then the solitary, pitied, pitted, maimed drunk. It’s a major shift of roles.

The government paid our compensation quickly, and it would have been hard for it to do otherwise given the public outrage. The papers printed picture after picture of John and me. Editorials raged about the damage done, ran old, close-up photographs of me smiling, holding a glass of wine at a party, laughing in a swimming-suit, grinning at my graduation. All with my permission. When I’d recovered enough, some journalists came to the hospital with photographers and they interviewed me and took photographs of my ruined face. For them it was meat and drink; for me it was a small, sad revenge. I hoped that the men who had placed the Semtex would see these images. I wasn’t foolish enough to imagine that they’d be filled with remorse but I hoped they would, if only for a moment, be shamed. Above all I did it for John. I would have done anything to enable him to be again that wild, almost dangerous boy. I missed him, that boy. I still do.