IT’S 6.30pm, and I am sitting at the table in my friend’s kitchen, trying to ignore Doc, her newish rescue dog, the size of a wart-hog, who’s eyeballing me from across the room.

WE’RE about to make a road trip to my sister’s house in Sligo, to help revive us after recent hospitalisations.

IT IS seven days post-op, 10pm, and I’m in the upstairs bathroom trying to fix a raised toilet seat to our existing one.

FRANKLY, I don’t think being in a state of denial comes naturally to me. But you don’t get better at something by not doing it, so I’ve been practicing assiduously for two weeks.

RUMOURS have been circulating for a while that Kanye West had been ‘begging’ Anna Wintour to put his fiancée, Kim Kardashian, on the cover of American Vogue.

TIME has been turning; ordinary days, filled with ordinary stuff, have moved quietly into the past without my noticing.

I’VE JUST discovered that my 48-year-old husband will be undergoing a hip replacement on my birthday.

NOT counting childbirth, and looking for the right exit off the Boulevard Peripherique — with four children in the back of the car, broken indicators, and the wrong map — placing my child’s future in the hands of a neurosurgeon has been the most immersive experience of my life.

ELEVEN in the morning, Customs area, Stansted airport — and no amount of wishful thinking is going to turn my over-stuffed canvas holdall into “a second small carry-on bag, no bigger than 35cm x 20cm x 20cm, which will allow a bottle of wine or equivalent to be carried”.

HOME, bed, 11.40pm.