In a world where paying your own way and owning your own home gets more and more difficult, swapping your independence for wealth might sound like a fair deal. But there’s a dangerous precedent involved in setting yourself up as a commodity.

On English breakfast television last week, two journalists got into a preposterous spat about whether women should do their make-up and glam up before going into the labour ward. Yes, you read that correctly.

"Numbers are logical, straight-forward. It’s emotions and bad habits that mess things up."

Look at the cleaning and decluttering influencers we have embraced. Not only do they have beautiful homes and children but they themselves are often very beautiful, and that standard has not helped anybody’s idea of what their homes should look like

The fact that Ardern’s speech felt revolutionary is an indicator of how much we still see the expression of a personal limit as weakness

The last time I went to the chemist (which, for the record, was yesterday), the pharmacist actually laughed to see me again

I prefer not to commit emotional words to posterity in an email or a text because I know it’s difficult to walk back from the written word

What’s so wrong with a ‘boring’ life? A life where things run to plan and on schedule, a life of no alarms and no surprises?

'I’m not a big planner but I do like to ask myself what I would like to happen in the coming year or what my best case scenario for the year ahead might look like'

Christmas Eve reminds me of the feeling I used to get at the end of an exam, a feeling of utter relief commingled with a little bit of guilt – could I have studied more, or made a bigger effort? Either way, it was too late now.