If you can find it in your hearts to forgive me, that would be huge. If you want to send me a one-way ticket to a colony for social lepers, that’s also to be expected. But I’m just so sorry I maligned my husband, who is totally faithful. I want to make it clear that my kids are the light of my life. I’m also sorry I was bitchy about my friends – I’m actually just off to the vet to get my claws done. And I was completely out of order about my mother, who single-handedly and heroically raised three teenage daughters after our dad died. Mum, I owe you the biggest apology of all. I’m sorry.

And to my dear sisters I say, life’s not worth living without you, so please be friends with me again.

Okay, that’s enough grovelling for one day, or I’ll have no skin left on my kneecaps. Anyway, here’s hoping some of you can forgive me, because, at the moment, I don’t know whose name to write in the ‘In case of emergency, please notify’ sections of official forms, which is truly tragic. Meanwhile, I’ll be here staring at the sky, hoping for an incoming asteroid with my name on it.

Remorsefully, Ruby.

I wasn’t sure exactly how this email had been received but I was aware that the looks I got from people in the supermarket or at the gym or on the boardwalk at the beach had shifted from wariness to pity. Old friends and colleagues who’d been snubbing me altogether now greeted me with a cool formality. They looked at me curiously, as if I had spinach in my teeth or had tucked my skirt into my undies.

My mother was the first vulture to feast on my carcass. When I answered the rat-a-tat of her many-ringed hand on the front door, she greeted me, her youngest daughter, with all the enthusiasm with which she might welcome a gangrenous pustule.

‘What have you done to yourself?’ she said, the implication being, ‘you look like shit’. She made lip-farts when she disagreed with anything her daughters said or did. As I now apologised in person, my mother had a chronic attack of lip flatulence.