It’s 10:55pm. This night, fifteen years ago, I was huge and uncomfortable and eight days overdue, thinking to myself ‘Is this baby ever going to arrive?’ It was certainly taking its time. My friend Sinead, whose baby was due the same day as mine, had already given birth seventeen days ago, and here I was, plodding around, looking like a planet with limbs.

Fifteen years later, and here I am, waiting…this time for the coffee cake that she’s requested for her fifteenth birthday tomorrow to come out of the oven. The same cake she’s wanted for her birthday for years.

Little did I know, this time fifteen years ago, that I’d fall so madly in love with the it that turned out to be a she that making her birthday cake long after my bedtime would feel like a blessing rather than a chore.