‘We were thinking, what, a less civilian hairstyle? Perhaps a bright colour to distract from your face. I’m feeling teal, indigo, possibly apricot, with a chop less middle-aged-mum-at-the-bingo and more “don’t mess me with me, I am a queen”.’

Kathy deigned to glance across at me. ‘That hair tone is upsetting. I didn’t think they sold such dismal shades outside Eastern Europe.’

‘This is my natural hair colour!’

Kathy widened her eyes, shoved her drink spout back in her mouth, and turned back to the window.

Panic started pumping through my system as Duncan droned on about eyebrows and cosmetic enhancements, underwear to provide a ‘more natural silhouette’. Apparently my 34D breasts were totally last decade.

Looks aside, I wasn’t overly proud. I knew my style tended towards too-busy-to-bother, and I was fine with that, like most women I would much rather be judged on what came out of my mouth and what I wrote than on how plumped my lips were. I knew that most people would judge me on who I was, not the lack of flaws on my filtered face.

But that was the problem, wasn’t it? Because who I would be, in this instance, was Nora Sharp, and she was gradually being shaped by the media machine into a nit-picking dragon with a wedge of bitter lemon where her heart should be. In between all the positive, thoughtful, constructive reviews, Nora Sharp made her fame and fortune from the random sentences that were ripped out of context and then twisted into a cruel meme. If you searched for Nora Sharp online, the ‘sharpest quotes ever’ compilations and social media threads all created an image of a woman who relished other people’s mistakes and failures, and enjoyed nothing more than getting thousands of other people to laugh at them along with her.

Nora Sharp had no right to expect any peeks into her personal life to be received with grace, or critiqued with kindness.

But there was worse.

Was I ready for my family to find out that Nora Sharp was in fact their beloved daughter, or the good citizens of Windermere and the staff at the Tufted Duck to discover that I was the person responsible for the failure of Emma from The Great British Bake Off’s new restaurant venture?

Nora Sharp had morphed into a monster, and at the end of the day I was the only one who could stop her. I could pretend my reluctance to reveal myself was shyness as much as I liked, but that’s not what the real problem was.

I had promised myself that one of these days, when I’d finally got a publisher for the new novel I never got around to finishing, or my Eleanor Sharpley blog somehow ended up paying all my bills, I would stop. Once I’d gained enough of a reputation to be able to move into other areas of journalism, like those fluffy magazine interviews about a soap opera star’s three-month wedding anniversary. Once I’d written the real food, rustic cookbook I dreamed about when sampling yet more unidentifiable gastro-gubbins.