I spoke with my daughter yesterday. After a short while it became apparent that something wasn’t quite right. She eventually told me that she felt really stressed. It’s difficult when all you want to do is give someone a hug but they’re miles away. It’s her final year: she has a dissertation due in a month and she starts her last set of exams shortly afterwards. She’s in a group of three and they are conducting an experiment, but circumstances have transpired that she has been the one who has had to spend day after day on campus conducting the testing of the participants, whilst one of her group has been abroad and the other has spent half of each week at home with his parents. She feels snowed under with work. She’s waking in the early hours, and not sleeping properly.

I asked her what is the worst that can happen? I don’t graduate, she replied. And what then? I have to redo the year. Is that such a bad thing? It upsets my plan. Well, that’s life, plans often have to change. So, if the very worst case scenario is not that bad, why make yourself ill worrying about it? We also discussed how she needs to be kinder to herself. I reminded her that it’s been non-stop since her car accident last May. She lost her summer holidays to pain relief, physiotherapy and trying to process the situation she found herself in, and no sooner was she emerging from it all than she was back at uni with the onslaught of the final year. I suggested that she discuss how she’s feeling with her supervisor – if you don’t tell people you’re struggling, they won’t know. I think she felt better – she said she did.

The conversation reminded me of the day in my early thirties when I walked out of the office to go to a meeting and realised that I couldn’t go on, and went home, leaving my trainee to go to it alone. I remember how I felt that day. I had an overwhelming feeling that I just couldn’t carry on – there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that it was the right thing to do, no concern that I was letting anybody down. The only other time that I have been that absolute is when I married my husband. I was signed off work for two weeks with ‘exhaustion’, the culmination of running an expedited trial which instead of taking a year to progress, was condensed into less than a couple of months; working incredibly long hours, every day. I coped because I was expected to cope, and like my daughter I just got on with it, reliably taking up the slack. It wasn’t a great work environment, driven by data, with little consideration for the person. The night before my mother had told me that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer – it was the nudge that had pushed me over the edge.

I learnt two important lessons from that experience: no-one is indispensable (they managed to get by without me) and how to say ‘no’. As a consequence work became more tolerable, but not enough for me to go back after maternity leave.

Whenever I hear that a friend’s child wants to be a lawyer, my heart sinks. I still feel uncomfortable when I go back into a corporate environment. The visit to Clifford Chance’s offices during the Low Res to see Jo Boddy’s wonderful exhibition stirred up some old feelings. But worth it because what amazing work. It was a privilege to hear her thinking behind her process, and how she went about its making.