F or reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me,” Alan Downs says, “I’m sharing more with you than I ever have anyone else.” Downs is far more accustomed to being in my position: listening intently to clients sat opposite him on the couch. He’s a clinical psychologist. This time, I’m listening intently as he shares something that, for most people, would be extremely painful: both his parents are critically ill. It’s likely they’ll die any day now.

But for Downs, the grief comes with an element of resignation. “It’s a sadness I’ve come to realise I have to accept in life,” he says with the gentlest of sighs. But that acceptance, that resignation, isn’t about them dying. It’s about the fact they haven’t seen or spoken to him in more than 11 years. “I’ve never had accepting parents,” he says. “It’s a loss and a hunger that’ll never be satiated.”