I got on a plane to my mother’s hospital and my husband was eleven rows in front of me with my best friend. There was a note of hers in my handbag that she’d written on my fridge that morning.

So it was in my handbag, in a side pocket, at about ten past nine in the morning.

There is a third thing I thought about putting in that box and did not, and I have gone backwards and forwards on it ever since.

My phone has a photograph in it from the fourteenth of February this year. Her, me and the two of them, at the Lyle, for Corin’s birthday.

Saskia has her arm round me in it and I put it on there myself and about nine people commented.

I got as far as taking it out in that toilet cubicle and looking at it.

And I put it away, because I worked out what it would be doing.

A photograph would have been me saying look at what you did to me. It would have been asking them for something.

A boarding pass does not ask for anything. It is a fact with my name on it and there is nothing you can do with a fact.