TWO

years before that, in 2015, I was living in a large, terraced family house in Highbury, North London, with a husband and four children.

My life was a model of stability. I had been married to the same man for 25 years. For the past 15 years I had lived in the same place, which itself was less than three miles from the large, terraced family house where I grew up. I had worked at the same newspaper for 32 years and every Monday for more than two decades had written the same column.

Most mornings at 9.30am I would cycle to the Financial Times, where an office full of hacks, many of whom had also been there for decades, sat at their desks drinking coffee out of cardboard cups. At the end of the day I would cycle home, where most nights I would make supper for my children, my husband and for my dad, who lived near by.

In the space of two years I tore it