I’d love to say that I’m a high-functioning alcoholic, but I’m not. It’s much more complex. When Christmas came I was here alone and I’d been sober for weeks. Then, the day before Christmas Eve, I realised what was going to happen. How I would be trapped here, in my own home, with my memories.

I opened a bottle of prosecco that someone at work had given me as a present and the next thing I remember was Boxing Day. I was lying on the kitchen floor. The long kitchen table was cleared of boxes and laid with three full Christmas dinners, with all the trimmings. Cold and congealed. My head hurt and I spotted several booze bottles in the sink. There was more food laid out on the kitchen sides. I’d cooked enough for about eight people.

Then it struck me. Where had the food come from? I had no food in before Christmas. Therefore, I must have been out. I rushed through the box towers to the front window and my car was parked askew in the road. I knew in the back of my mind what had made me do it. Christmas without my children. No escape except the in-between. But I also knew that, equally, I couldn’t stop it.

There are periods, though, when I’m so completely engrossed in my job that I don’t drink and don’t order things online. That I don’t go to Premier Inn and pick up strange men. During that time I don’t crave alcohol. It’s when I’m in my own home – our home – and I’m suddenly confronted by a closed bedroom door or a sock behind a radiator. By my own children and the unfairness of what happened.

Which brings me to now again. I hear next door’s dog barking. It never fucking shuts up, like some kind of frantic burglar alarm that goes off when someone even tiptoes anywhere near it, regular as clockwork. Your mother’s round the back of my house, peering through my kitchen window. I duck out of sight behind a pile of shoeboxes. She stays there for a while, then she gets her phone out and takes a picture of the kitchen. Then she disappears and I hear her footsteps click-click-clicking up the path. They stop on the front step again and there’s an almost indiscernible thud as she leans against the front door.

The dog’s stopped barking now. She opens the letter box again and I duck.

‘It’s pointless, Caroline. If you’re in there, you need to listen. And listen good. You’re not a fit mother. You never were. So if all this is about thinking you can win, forget it. Forget. It.’