By mid-2020 my service was experiencing more than a 50 per cent increase in demand, which my colleagues and I struggled to meet. We were ear-witnesses to the impact of Covid-19 on the mental health of new and expecting parents. The phone was like a relentlessly crying newborn.

However, since the early 1990s, research has shown that rather than hitting a glass ceiling, men working in the ‘female professions’ take a ride on what sociologist Christine Williams famously termed ‘the glass escalator’. In 1992, she wrote, ‘men take their gender privilege with them when they enter predominantly female occupations; this translates into an advantage in spite of their numerical rarity’.

The video for Taylor Swift’s new single ‘Wildest Dreams’ has been condemned by many commentators as a racist neo-colonial folly. However, this critique can be extended. Rather than being completely absent, I would argue the people of Africa are represented in this video by the continent’s wildlife. This racist analogy has deep roots – not only in the Hollywood era depicted by Swift and co., but the entire history of European imperialism in Africa.

In January 1974, Valerie, my fourteen-year-old half-sister, was taken to a Victorian police station, charged with being ‘exposed to moral danger’. She had been punched in the face at a party, and a doctor who had attended to her injuries reported concerns about her welfare to the police. According to the sole surviving piece of documentation, Valerie was delivered to the remand section of Winlaton Youth Training Centre.