“I think I need to talk to a man.”

Ten years ago, almost to the tea break, I was standing at the kettle in my then-office, unburdening myself to a colleague. Her parents, I knew, were psychotherapists. She had a clear-eyed, no-bullshit openness about mental health that, in 2012, felt relatively rare. Carly Rae Jepsen and Olly Murs were in the charts, my local allotments had been dug up to make a concourse for the Olympic Park and ‘cigarette trousers’ were a thing; talking openly about your psychological welfare was, well, not.

At the time, I had just log-flumed out of a six-year relationship and into my panic years. Single, renting, child free, nearly 30 and in an entry-level job, I’d also lost my claim to the man who’d loved me, looked after me and lived with me between the ages of 22 and 28. The man who had helped me buy a washing machine, who had driven me from Leeds to Cornwall on holiday listening only to Beatles albums, who took me to car boot sales and built shelves and fixed my bike and told me I looked nice. I had lost the male voice in my life; my central male figure. I had no brother, no uncle I was close to, and there were few purely platonic men in my life – especially not ones who I felt able to lean on in that way. Meanwhile, my father and I were teetering somewhere along the semantic edge between being distant and being estranged.