Rewind a couple of hours, and Bea and I were having lunch at Fall & Well, a little coffee shop on Denmark Street run by three hot brothers, catching up on life as we normally did on any other Hump Day Wednesday. It was our thing. We used this midweek session to sit and bitch about our jobs (and our bosses) for an hour. I was interning at a celebrity gossip magazine and Bea was a gallery assistant. Both our bosses were similar in their contempt and behaviour towards us: for some reason they wanted to make our lives hell. My boss was called Amie (a pretentious way of spelling Amy, if you ask me). Her nickname behind her back was Amie Hammer because she was as hard as nails. She wore these tasselled, heeled shoes to work, and every time she marched towards you to tell you off, you heard the tassels swishing first. It was a warning sign to get ready for a bollocking. My job was to get ‘scoops’, to find out if so-and-so was pregnant so we could ‘break’ the news first. I basically sat on Perez Hilton’s website and made sure we copied (paraphrased) the hottest (or grimmest) American news stories onto our site – and I hated it. I wanted to be a writer, and this seemed like the logical first step in ‘getting my foot in the door’, according to all the career advisers at university. Just go for any old job, they said, as long as you can publish something! Writing horrible stories about reality TV stars really wasn’t what I had imagined for myself, even if I did seem to have a knack for it.

‘It feels like the better I perform at work, the more Amie Hammer hates me,’ I sighed, drinking from my coffee cup.

‘Oh Ol, don’t worry. It’s not you. I guess we just have to suck it up during these early years. The older women up the chain seem to have been told that the only way to “get ahead” is to scream at everyone.’

‘You’re right. Being the intern is just so hard sometimes.’

‘You can’t take it personally. They grew up in the “one seat at the table for women” era. Amie Hammer is threatened by you.’

‘Ha! I highly doubt that, Bea.’

‘She is. You’re young. You’ll take her job one day,’ Bea said confidently, piling more sugar into her coffee.

Mine and Bea’s lives have always paralleled, almost exactly. The four of us in the friendship group have gone through most things together, but Bea and I are something else. Our birthdays are just a few days apart, we started our periods at the same summer camp together, we both tried to insert our first tampon in the same bathroom together, we started our very first jobs years later in the same local pub pulling pints; and now we both had jobs that made us cry in our respective company toilets. For so long, we’d moved up the same ladder and our friendship had become more and more solidified on this basis. But today we’d found something brand new in common! Sitting in Fall & Well, we were both complaining about the same bodily annoyances: change in appetite, sore boobs, being grouchier than normal, having annoying headaches and a little bit of nausea thrown in for fun. Oh, and (er, most importantly) a very late period. Upon announcing this, we looked at each other through gritted teeth and realized we should probably check it out, together. We didn’t really have time to discuss how we felt about it emotionally – never mind what our boyfriends would think – as we had less than half an hour before we needed to traipse back to the office, aka our prison cells. So, we walked in silence to quickly find some answers. And the answers to modern life’s big questions were normally found in Boots.