I’ve never been one for weakness, or worrying. You know how it is. I’ve always stuck to a motto of: keep calm, carry on and whatever you do, don’t look back or even think about flunking or failing.

We’ve all got our reasons for staying strong, regardless, but I put my steeliness down to my rackety childhood.

It started off shiny enough. I was born in New York, where I lived with my parents and older brother and sister. One of my feel-good photographs from those halcyon years is of me, perched on a counter at a magazine party when I was three, dressed in a velvet dress, a tiara on my head, a grown-up’s discarded bottle of champagne beside me. I am grinning at the camera, as well I might. Life was a cracker.

Two years later, my American father died suddenly and my English mother whisked me and my sister, six, and my brother, 10, to England to start a new life. My mother was the centre of my world. I took everything about her, from her love for us to her love of cocktails and a good sing-song, for granted.

Then she went and died too, from cancer, when she was 42 and I was nine.

On paper, there were plenty of contenders to look after me, my sister and my brother. In reality, none of them were up to it.

"How cancer helped me embrace the real power of vulnerability"