EASY MONEY?

What are your memories of 2008? Does it have something to do with banks collapsing, thousands losing their homes and life savings, lots of confusing and frightening headlines about sub-prime mortgages, the Lehman Brothers, and the start of the biggest global recession in 80 years?

Thought so. For me, however, none of that really penetrated. My own world was in meltdown because my husband, Will, died in the February of that year, and everything else paled in comparison.

But the world doesn’t stop because you’re grieving. On the day of his funeral, I found out that the magazine I’d been editing had collapsed (like so many other businesses during that recession). I was in trouble. Everything to do with his estate was complicated, not least because it was a second marriage for both of us. It took 18 months before the lawyers released any money. In the meantime, I had four children to think about at three different