Is 2018 the year your tween becomes a teen? Suzanne Harrington shares her top tips for navigating the hormone-addled minefield. 

When you’re a kid you write to Santa with your wish list, but who do you write to when you’re an adult? God? Hmmmm. No-one? Too depressing. Facebook? Pfffft.

SO I’M all set. The decorators have just left, the ice rink is installed in the front garden.

HERE’S a letter from Irene in Manchester, published in the free London tabloid Metro (circulation 1,475,543, owned by the pro-Brexit Daily Mail, and commonly found littering commuter train carriages).

If you ever wanted to explain the word “metaphor” to a small child, show them a photo of this year’s White House Christmas decorations. 

When I left Ireland in the 1980s, it was because, at that time, Ireland felt like being inside a bubble where everyone looked the same, spoke the same, dressed the same, acted the same, ate the same, and thought the same says Suzanne Harrington

What’s your biggest fear? Being eaten feet first by sharks? Spiders nesting in your ear? Being thrown off a roof by frothing maniacs?

There is never a good time to write a novel, writes Suzanne Harrington

We should probably thank Harvey Weinstein. That ripping sound you’re hearing might just be a tiny tear in the patriarchy. Tear as in laceration, although there are probably quite a few men crying fat salty ones for themselves in private, except the type of man who preys on people less powerful than himself for sexual gratification is probably born without tear ducts.

The English don’t get Halloween. While it’s the second spendiest holiday in America after Christmas — in 2014 Americans spent six billion dollars on pumpkin spiced latte and plastic spiders — in England it is still regarded with suspicion.