A couple of days before I was - thankfully - due to come back to London, I made soup for the family. What my Mam pointed out - halfway through cooking - was that I hadn’t put enough in the saucepan to serve all five of us. I told her, so long as she balanced the stock with lentils, then everything should be okay. However, we ran out of lentils and she put more stock in to make more soup. When it was time to serve up, the soup was thin and watery; it had little flavour apart from the vegetables. In my mind, it was her fault.

“Well I can put some cornflour in or something, to thicken it up. Or liquidise it?”

“Well I’m not eating it regardless, so do with it what you want.” I told her, angry and embarrassed that it could be my fault.

I sat there at the table just staring at the soup, trying a couple of mouthfuls and sitting there in disgust. I felt so bad. I had made her feel bad, coz I was blaming her; and she was there feeling guilty because she had ruined my soup. And it even breaks my heart to write that, to say that she felt this way -- it’s like I want to deny it because I feel so horrible to have caused her to feel like that. She did so much for me, always had - and I always just sat there and criticised because I honestly believed it wasn’t my fault. I felt like I was a failure, just like she felt she had failed the soup. I got sad over soup.