I’d been exercising six times a week in the lead-up to the wedding, but the first time I slipped out from under Mum and Dad’s continued loving scrutiny I hadn’t meant for it to be for a run. I just couldn’t be in the house anymore, and at 5 a.m. I knew it would be at least another two hours before anyone else got up, so I could steal out undetected – not least because Carol had been sleeping on Freddie’s camp bed in Alexander’s office, so I didn’t even need to navigate her yapping to get out of the door. At 5 a.m. there was no chance of bumping into anyone I knew out there on the streets, or having to explain myself; 5 a.m. was freedom.

I was sick of trying to put words to it all. I’d only intended to walk, but walking wasn’t enough. I’d got faster and faster until I was easily doing less than a nine-minute mile. The faster I went, the better I felt, and over the course of the next couple of days I started to leave a house key under the plant pot by the door, going from Newington Green to Highbury Fields, looping down to Old Street sometimes too, every single morning, no music, nothing weighing me down, just the sound of my feet hitting the tarmac.

One morning I passed by a Barry’s Bootcamp. I must have passed it several times, actually, but that morning was the first time I’d noticed it. Barry’s was high impact and almost killed you – or so Kezza had once told me. She used to go to one near her office. In a big, red-lit studio, she’d said, you basically take turns running full pelt on one of the lined-up treadmills and then doing burpees and lunges and squats and arm lifts with a series of weights. I thought about it for the rest of the day, deliberating slowing down in front of it to peek my head in the door the next morning. I think it was expectation of loud music and darkness that drew me in. I didn’t want to lose any more weight, not like I had done for the wedding – if anything, I could probably have done with putting some on. Even my running gear was a bit loose, and I’d sized down for that when I got it. But bootcamp could be about something else. Strength, maybe. Endurance. Resilience. Power. The idea of it spoke to me.