Settling back on the chair, and with three hours until she had agreed to meet her parents at the carvery, she opened Facebook and saw a banner crisscrossed with bunting and a message from the Facebook team wishing her a ‘Happy Birthday!’

‘Ah, that’s nice,’ she smiled, wondering how they knew.

Her eyes were drawn to a number of posts all cued up and awaiting her attention. Her heart soared and Bess realised in that second that she might not be six, but actually, popularity among her peers was still quite important.

‘Look at that, Chutney – sixteen birthday messages!’ she chortled. ‘Not bad, eh?’

Bess clicked on one to open it and her face fell when she saw it was a message for Sushmita that she had been tagged in. This was in fact the case for over half of them, all with heartfelt ‘love ’n’ hugs’ sent from her colleagues to Sushmita on her special day! It shouldn’t have bothered her – she was a grown woman, after all – and yet it did, and pretty soon, she was plunged straight back into how she had felt in the school hall, like she just wasn’t good enough.

She wondered if everyone had those moments from the past that stuck in the grooves of the brain and were there for perfect recall decades later. It might have been a surreptitious look you weren’t supposed to see that pulled the plug on your confidence, or as in her case, a comment that took hold quickly, a tiny seed that germinated, taking root faster than she could reach for a mental scythe with which to fell it. A little moment that had shaped her in ways she hadn’t realised until she was able to look back and see the track it left in her consciousness: a trail that grew deeper the more she mentally walked it, until it was carved for all eternity. And then something curious had happened – other thoughts, ideas and preconceptions became rooted in it until it filled her brain like a tree with branches and snaking, vine-covered tendrils over which all thought had to climb or navigate.