"I thought – didn’t you? – that we were meant to get tougher as we got older. Children are delicate blooms to be sheltered from the cold, harsh winds of reality for as long as possible lest the tender shoots of their innocence be blighted.

Hormones ensure that during adolescence every nerve ending and synapse is alert and shivering constantly with exquisite sensitivity, but once you’re through that, the rest of life is just a gradual shrivelling and calcification of everything from joints to soul. Or, as that much-neglected philosopher of our youth Ally Sheedy put it in The Breakfast Club – when you grow up, your heart dies.

I was quite looking forward to it. How much easier life would become once it was reduced to working, eating, sleeping and no longer complicated by excessive feeling. But now I am well into my 30s I find that this promise of internal peace/ emotional deadness was but a phantom. Instead of becoming hardened, my friends and I are becoming softer by the minute. I cry more now than I ever did as a teenager. Admittedly, the news is particularly unrelentingly and genuinely bleak at the moment, with children being murdered in Manhattan bathtubs, 15-year-old girls being shot in the head by the Taliban, disabled people being abused in care homes and of course the whole vile and wretched Jimmy Savile saga, but I hit my sobbing point long before such horrors. I welled up when the Queen’s corgi died and I hit a new low by crying over the fate of 100,000 ash trees burned by environment officials to prevent the spread of disease.

“I cry more now than I ever did as a teenager”