I wonder if I’ve been ungracious to 31. And yet I have avoided this blank screen. It feels as if all the nice things I could say about that year are covered in a film I don’t want to touch. But that is not scorn for the girl who was 31, it is what can only be described as pity. Shining fruits sitting in her palm that hid their rot until she bit into them.

The girl who was 31 had a beautiful wedding, wore a beautiful gown, danced to Octopus’s Garden with her dad in the botanical garden he too...