I am safe and strong and capable.

The cupboard under the stairs took two years and then one Sunday afternoon. For two years it was not a cupboard, it was a mood — a thing you walked past and adjusted your day around.

Capability is close to impossible to assess in advance, because the assessing gets done by a version of you who has not begun and therefore holds no data at all. The one who is twenty minutes in is a different animal, and much better informed.

Safe, strong, capable: the evidence for all three is unglamorous. Sunday afternoons. Calls made from the car. Two-year objects that turned out to be four hours and a bin bag.