Sexy, romantic holidays with Dom had followed in her late twenties, back when he was still Dom the Bomb rather than Dom the shitty ex-husband. Holidays where she’d packed seven bikinis, a few strappy dresses and scented body lotion. Very little else. Dreamy nights beneath a rotating ceiling fan, rubbing after-sun into each other’s tanned bodies. Not that she’d want to do such things with Dom now, mind, especially with the paunch he’d developed in recent years, but at the time it had felt like paradise.

Hard on the heels of the romantic holidays and then the honeymoon had come the summer breaks with their young children, when there was no longer anything remotely holidayish or relaxing about the experience. In fact those weeks away turned out to mean exactly the same old exhaustion and drudgery in a different place, where the babies wouldn’t sleep and developed prickly heat and they were all packed into a one-bedroom apartment, and it was hell. Then, once Izzie and Jack had grown up into small, toddling wrecking-machines, she would spend the entire time away worrying that they were going to topple off a balcony or plunge head-first into the nearest pool, if she took her eyes off them for a second. Over the years she had assembled an impressive line of foreign phrases, namely ‘My child is drowning!’, ‘I need a doctor!’ and ‘Help!’ in various languages, ready to scream the appropriate words at any given moment.

It was always such a relief to come home after these ‘holidays’, even if she did then find herself yearning, quite ferociously, for a week on her own in a hotel somewhere to recover, with room service, silence and a well-stocked minibar.

Still, if she’d thought those years were tough, then the first summer as a single mum had been the worst yet. Izzie was eleven and Jack ten, and Em had been so determined to give them a brilliant time and show the world she could manage just fine without Dom that the three of them had gone to Florida for the so-called holiday of a lifetime. Yes, so the photos might show the kids beaming with Bart Simpson and Goofy, and dive-bombing each other in a turquoise pool, but they sure as hell didn’t show Em accidentally rear-ending the hire car and bursting into tears, or Izzie picking up a vomiting bug on the second day, or Jack getting stung by a wasp and having an allergic reaction that had seen them racing for the nearest hospital in a heart-pounding adrenalin dash. She had returned to the UK a complete wreck beneath her mahogany tan; jet-lagged, skint and vowing ‘never a-bloody-gain’.