AIDA AUSTIN: ’All the advice I’ve been given is about to blast to the surface’

My daughter ended up in hospital this week. She’s home now. Singing her head off in the shower as I write. Pissed off that we’ve run out of Pantene conditioner — but singing all the same.

Fourteen weeks post-op, family and close friends have reassembled like a raggle-taggle love-battalion; calling, texting, skyping and arriving in person. It seems the course of neurosurgery doesn’t run smoothly — but at least the course of love does.

And now that this most recent crisis has resolved, and life has stopped feeling like it’s transposed into a scene from Grey’s Anatomy, I’d like, this week, to raise the issue of advice, which is one of the main pieces of equipment that a love-battalion carries in order to perform its operations of support.