Women go on and on about wanting to be valued for more than their looks, but they do this to each other. They greet each other with compliments, often fake. I don’t want to look like a praying mantis. But if I gave in to food I’d swell up like a pregnant rhinoceros. Staying thin is a consistently agonising task. All women know that. Yvonne is projecting her own delusions about her size and possibly hoping I greet her with the same false positive. I don’t. She’s put on weight and it’s not worth denying.

I am the last to arrive and they all stand awkwardly for me. They’ve all been told to get off me when they have touched my body. They’ve all been snapped at, told to shut up. Warned not to mention things enough times to be wary of how to be around me. I don’t feel good about being so demanding, but there is no doubt my time with them is easier since I set such boundaries.

Their children are older than mine because it didn’t take them as long to find husbands. They all live in Queen’s Park. All living the dreamy London mum life, which centres around their kids’ social activities and dinner parties.

‘So how is Bonnie?’ asks Jess. She had her babies at home and runs a charity for pregnant women who live on the streets. The charity ensures they get the best chance possible for a safe delivery. She likes to tell stories about how homeless women, who have everything against them, still have wonderful experiences of birth. I have asked her many times not to relay them around me. She gets upset – once she even said I was selfish, which I suppose is true. But I explained about Bonnie hammering down onto my birth canal for hours, before being cut out of me, and how I now have a high chance of prolapse if I stand still for too long. That put an end to the happy birth stories.

‘Bonnie is alright. She was ill this week though, and we had a terrible time with her nursery so I was forced to find somewhere new.’

‘Oh no,’ Yvonne says. And I immediately wish I had lied, because then she does that thing that people do when they are very happy with something in their life, and start recommending it to you over and over again despite you telling them it isn’t right. ‘I can speak to the ladies at the nursery Florence used to go to, they’re so lovely. Oh God, I miss them. I can ask them on Monday.’

‘No, don’t do that,’ I say. ‘I’ve found a new place and I live in Kentish Town anyway, I couldn’t take her down there every day.’

‘Oh, but it’s so good. Seriously, worth the commute,’ she says, not listening to me.

‘I can’t take her to nursery in Queen’s Park, I don’t live there. I found a new place. She just needs to settle in.’ I’m trying to stay calm and rational.