It is a six-page, handwritten letter, from an elderly man whose wife had recently died of cancer, that sticks out most in Jan Robinson’s mind. “He told me that he had taken it upon himself to learn flower arranging.

His wife had made a fresh arrangement for their hall table every single week of their marriage and he wanted to honour her memory. While some men simply fall apart, others do extraordinary things like that. I thought he was simply wonderful.”

But then Jan, 71, a mother-of-four from west London, did something extraordinary in the wake of bereavement, herself.