I’d been in my parents’ house some time before my sister J eventually came downstairs to greet me.

When she made her grand entrance she was barely recognisable, dressed in a tiny pair of denim jeans and a pale blue short-sleeved satin top. Her face was no longer one of a woman in her mid-fifties, but that of a young girl just out of her teens.

There was only one explanation for the transformation: crash dieting and Botox. My sister had finally succumbed to Home Counties peer pressure to spend a fortune on ‘treatments’. I hoped that she didn’t expect me to do the same.