For years and years, since I was a little girl, what I really wanted was to be an architect. Specifically, what I wanted was to renovate and restore old houses, to find crumbling unloved buildings and patch them up. Oak floorboards, high ceilings, polished staircases, duck egg blue walls; I wanted to play with windows and light. I wanted to clear out the tangled gardens and strip back the plaster to the original bricks, sand…

I don’t think my anxiety would have spun out of control quite as quickly had my family been more conscientious about their health. Or, to be more accurate, if my father had actually gone to the doctor more than once in the past decade. He’s young, for a father of a 25-year-old (only 52), but his family history is riddled with cancer and heart disease, and his nightly wine consumption doesn’t exactly do his liver…