I ponder this. ‘Oh, I know – Izzy’s become fanatical about cooking. This is all your fault!’

Jules laughs. ‘She’s a natural, isn’t she?’

‘She is. She loves playing TV chef in our kitchen. It’s a regular thing with us now, her Izzy Cooks! shows. So that’s been fun. I mean, it used to be virtually impossible to wrangle her away from pasta, noodles, rice – all the plain carbs. And now she’s demanding manuka honey and Himalayan pink salt. Obviously, her mission is to ruin us financially …’ I break off. Is that the best I can do? That I’m encouraging my daughter to vary her diet? I think of Penny, and her son Nick, and the Angel Delight (‘He turned out just fine! What’s the problem?’).

Jules smiles. ‘And you’ve been encouraging her and facilitating all of that.’ She’d never use that word normally: facilitating. For some reason, I want to laugh.

‘Yes, I suppose I have.’

‘How about we go back to achievements?’ she suggests. ‘Any more you can think of?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I say.

‘They don’t have to be huge things. Small ones are important too. But it’s important to recognise them because, so often, we don’t even notice what we’re managing in life. We just think it’s part of being a woman, a mum, all that. We don’t give ourselves the credit we deserve.’

I exhale, trying to dredge up something else.

‘Take your time,’ she says.

So that, in my sun-filled living room, is what I start to do, simply because Jules has asked me to. Never a natural rebel, I have always been happier to follow instructions. And I haven’t achieved heaps; I don’t save lives or speak at conferences. There are no pictures of me looking polished with a microphone, beaming confidently from behind a podium. When I was a child, I didn’t do brilliantly at academic subjects; I passed my exams through sheer hard graft, wanting to please my parents and teachers and feel that I’d done well.

Maths baffled me. Biology was manageable, but physics and chemistry scrambled my brain. This frustrated my mum a little, as she was a science teacher herself. Dad, who ran his own wedding photography business, was more relaxed over school-related matters. I loved drama, mainly: writing and helping to stage school plays, rather than performing. I enjoyed college, opting for theatre studies, and had a wonderful career, or so I thought; but like so many women I allowed it to falter, and then fizzle out completely. Perhaps I should have cast the net further when looking to get back into theatre after I’d had Izzy. Temping at Flaxico had seemed like an easier option at the time. I could kick myself now for lacking the determination to find a job I loved.