When Frances started at Life Clubs she had no hair from her chemotherapy, had already started working hard back at her job as surgeon (because she was ‘better’) but felt her life was a little bit out of kilter. ‘Life Clubs made me focus. I remember the workshop in which I thought about what made me happy as a child. I then put a few of those things into a week which would otherwise have been grind… exhaustion… collapse.’ Frances says. ‘It made the difference between having a ‘happy’ or a ‘sad’ week.’

Filling in her Balance Chart regularly showed Frances what was bothering her and she kept making very small changes to her life, noticing how each one was making a difference, especially to her self worth. ‘I stopped beating myself up so much.’

The one missing thing in the equation was a partner. Divorced at 31, told by a matchmaking bureau at 38, ‘You’re too old and you earn too much money – there’s no demand for women like you’, Frances had been ‘terribly lonely’ for twenty years. ‘I think I’d gone past the point of no return. I thought I’d never meet a man, let alone one that was free. And I’d also begun to think I’d be no good at a long-term relationship. Life Clubs made me realize that the only obstacle to meeting anyone was me.’

‘But when you’ve given up finding anyone and least expect it and when you’ve got your life pretty well under control (thanks to a year at Life Clubs), things happen and I met Martin at an all-girls lunch, he was the brother-in-law of one of my girlfriends and just happened to be there.’ Frances and Martin have been together for a year now. ‘He’s all I have looked for all my life,’ Frances says. ‘If I hadn’t done Life Clubs, I would have been so buried in the hazards I’d had, nothing would have registered. Instead it was so easy.’