Here I am, installed in a leather armchair, having an earnest exchange with a man who knows all my womanly secrets.

I must have sat in his office forty times in the past fifteen years, so familiar is the antique desk, the leadlight window throwing sunlit patterns on the wall. Behind him hangs a haunting Robert Dickerson portrait – a girl with an aquiline face and brooding almond-shaped eyes.

Without turning my head, I know the brightly-lit alcove over my right shoulder contains a waist-high bench topped with a hard mattress and a blue-and-white striped seersucker sheet.

I am sitting in the office of my obstetrician. Except on this occasion, I realise, I can no longer call him my obstetrician, because I’m sadly finished with the fraught business of making babies. Now, he becomes my gynaecologist, a word for making women squirm.