When I was growing up, my mum worked as a travel agent for Thomas Cook. It’s strange explaining to a teenager today that we used to go into a shop, look at a 40-page brochure about Tenerife, then get a woman called Jill to sort the flights and hotel. And it was always a hotel: Airbnb was nothing but a glint in the eye of the housing crisis. In the 2000s, you didn’t have to take the bins out, readjust a ‘gin o’clock’ wall-hanging, and deep clean a skirting board before leaving for your holiday.

My mum was sent on trips so that she knew how to sell them to customers. It was a different time; jobs often had something called ‘perks’ and you didn’t have to work in finance to have them. They let her bring family on these subsidised trips. I’m sure the financial crash and the internet were leading culprits in Thomas Cook’s ultimate downfall, but shipping families of four to all-inclusives in Lanzarote probably didn’t help. 

One of the packages they wanted to sell was a day trip to Lapland. That’s right: A DAY TRIP. To the Arctic Circle. It’s socially acceptable to kidnap a child in the night and send them to -25 degree climes if an old Finnish man with a performing-arts diploma gives them a chemistry set. I was told I could have one souvenir from the gift shop. Aged nine, I opted for a reindeer-antler bottle opener, a disturbing artefact that still haunts a shelf in my childhood bedroom. There were four hours of daylight and I got out of a maths test. Smashing.