Kneeling beside my little boy Aubrey, I helped him scoop wet sand into his plastic bucket and pat it down with the spade. Just as we’d turned out a perfect sandcastle, the tide came swishing towards us, and we leapt up and dashed away from the foam.
Aubrey, then two, giggled as I picked him up and ran to where my fiancé Joe was waiting with a towel to dry off his legs. ‘I’d never have been able to get away that quickly a year ago,’ I said with a laugh, as we headed off along the beach at Lytham St Annes.
Only a year earlier, I’d dreaded leaving the house