My husband put himself in first class and me in row thirty-four on our twenty-fifth anniversary. Four hours into that flight the captain asked for me by name.

Nobody arranged it. He came round for my son Bram and then he was just there, and I put a plate down and nobody ever discussed it, for about three years.

He did his college forms at my kitchen table with me sitting opposite him with a pen, because there was nobody at his to do it with.

And in the March of 2003 he needed four hundred and eleven dollars for a class one aviation medical, which is the first thing you have to pass and which you pay for yourself.

We did not have four hundred and eleven dollars. We had it in the sense that it was the tyres.

I gave it to him in an envelope and told him it was from a tax thing, and he was nineteen and he believed me, and I did the school run in a car with two bald tyres until the September.