At the urging of the photographer, I have all my weight on my front foot and my other leg casually cocked, like the head girl after hockey practice, and my arms folded across my chest. I am biting my lower lip as I grin. My hair took two hours for the stylist to get it that fashionably unkempt. The headline is ‘Your Next Date?’ and the piece inside was about dating apps, which is what I do for a living. The article covered five fledgling dating apps, but I had the cover all to myself. I look like a little minx. And I love that picture because it makes me look far more successful and beautiful and confident than I ever feel in normal life. That’s why – no matter how scared and sad it makes you feel – it is always good to be the one who goes. Because we all become someone else when we are unanchored by home, don’t we?

Christian is probably going to need an emergency plumber over the next few days but I will be gone, worrying about other things, no doubt, like looking a stuttering fool whose speech sucks in front of a conference hall full of clever strangers.

I pick up my suitcase and step out to the street and Phil, my regular driver, eases his considerable bulk out from behind the wheel to rush to help me. And it begins almost immediately, this transformation that takes place when we are unmoored from all that we love.

I feel it in the back of the car, watching the first planes of the day coming in for landing at the airport, these thin slivers of molten silver that look as if they are moving in slow motion, and I feel it after I have said goodbye to Phil and I am pottering about in the shops after security, buying all this stuff that I am fully aware I don’t need, treating myself to a triple espresso and a newly released paperback and some Clarins duty-free double serum.

By the time I am at 35,000 feet stretched out in my flatbed seat at the important business executive end of the cabin, an early morning glass of champagne wickedly cold in my hand, fussed over and pampered and euphoric to be above the clouds, the transformation is complete. I feel free, free at last, thank God almighty, I am free at last. More champagne? Oh, go on then.

But here’s the thing that I never really understand.

This person that you become when you are far away from heart and home – that independent, exciting and excited person, unencumbered by the mundane, knocking back the guilt-free fizz first thing in the morning, flying across the planet towards Tokyo. Is that just a role that you are playing? Are you on a minibreak from yourself?

Or have you become the person that you were meant to be all along?

I did not want to make a speech. The prospect terrified me.