PERHAPS this bizarre phenomenon has also happened in your household. See if any of this sounds familiar — if it does, it would be a great comfort to me. Not as schadenfreude, of course, but more as a reassurance that we are not, you know, freaks.

I am mildly aggrieved that nobody told me it was International Say Something Stupid Week. And yet what a week of utterances it has been. All kinds of stupid, which for the purposes of this column I will condense into three: Political Stupid, Academic Stupid, and WTF Stupid.

THE backpackers who got naked on the sacred mountain in Borneo aren’t a great advert for the phenomenon we call ‘gap year’.

One of the most unwavering let’s-not-go-there subjects in the history of let’s-not-go-there is prostitution.

I TUNED into BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, because it was about Ireland, and I still had that buoyant feeling from last week, says Suzanne Harrington.

I’ve never voted in Ireland because I left for good in my teens. I didn’t leave for economic reasons; I had a perfectly good job, unlike many of my peers during the late Eighties recession. No, I left for social reasons.

THE ARTIST David Hockney thinks gay people today are boring because they “want to be ordinary — they want to fit in.” 

IN AN attempt to alter my mind without the assistance of drugs or alcohol, I sign up for a month’s special offer of hot yoga. I used to do it a lot, and remember the amazing spaced out feeling that lasted all day after the class. 

IN 2015, bad travel is when a cheapskate airline charges you extra for your luggage because it weighs a few kilos too much, or when your flight has been delayed and you have to sit around an airport terminal full of ridiculously over-priced shops while eating your ridiculously over-priced sandwich, says Suzanne Harrington.

WHEN you think of Sue Perkins, the English broadcaster who has Enid Blyton levels of spunky jolliness, you might think, ‘ah yes, cake’.