A woman called Fen, who is a captain and who I had worked with since 2023, sent me a message that week which said: are you ok? nobody's saying anything.
And I did not answer it for nine days, because I could not work out how to write a sentence that did not sound like an excuse.
And when I did answer it I wrote four lines and all four of them were about my mother.
She wrote back: right. but what did you actually do?
That is the only time anybody has made me put it in one sentence with nothing round it, and I had to type it, and the sentence is: I took a working document to a family event and put it on a table in front of two hundred people.
No orange. No car with a bow. No 2016.
Twenty-two words, and every one of them true, and there is no version of them in which I am the one it was done to.
