But when morning came, my tongue was superglued with dryness to the roof of my mouth. Automatically, I stretched out my hand for my glass of water and gulped it in one go. Only when the last of it was racing down my throat did I remember. My contact lenses. I’d drunk my contact lenses. Again. The third time in six weeks. They were only monthly disposables, but all the same.

And the following day, as luck would have it, I lost my job.

I wasn’t exactly sacked. But my contract wasn’t renewed. It was a six-month contract and since I’d moved back to Dublin from Chicago it had already been renewed five times. I had thought renewing it again was a mere formality.

‘When you first started here,’ Frances said, ‘we were impressed with you. You were hard-working and reliable.’

I nodded. That sounded like me all right. On a good day.

‘But in the last six months or so, the standard of your work and commitment has dropped dramatically. You’re often late, you leave early…’

I listened, almost in surprise. Of course, I’d known that in my head stuff hadn’t been great, but I’d thought I’d done a pretty good job of presenting a convincing business-as-usual façade to the outside world.