REGULAR readers may have noticed that last week’s column, which fell on March 17, contained no mention of the day in question.

I’M loving this Fourth Wave of Feminism. All those years when we were told that swinging around a pole as exercise was both ironic and empowering always felt like a massive joke – on us. Raunch culture felt like a big fat lie. How could the galloping pornification of women and girls ever be empowering?

THERE is a line, invisible as electricity but just as shocking, that your kids will one day step over, when they move from being children to something far, far worse. Teenagers. It can happen in an instant, when a single sentence crystallises the transition, a lone throwaway remark telescopes the whole of childhood from the present to the past in the blink of an eye. Or in this case, the shake of a lamb’s tail. And that single, electrocuting sentence? “Lambs are crap.”

THE term has been around since 1970, but I’ve only recently learned how to spell it. S-p-e-c-i-e-s-i-s-m. You know, assigning different values to different creatures depending on what species they belong to.

SO you might be lying in the bath – the last refuge of the single parent – contemplating such imponderables as the existence of atheism, or whether you will ever be a size 12 again, or even a size 14.

THERE are few first world problems more humiliating than being too dumb for your smartphone. There you are, minding your own business, when the phone people ring up and tell you what a good customer you are.

AS an Irish citizen, I would have waded into this whole Panti / Iona thing earlier but I live in Brighton where everyone is busy bringing up their ordinary children in ordinary same sex households and getting married to whoever they ordinarily love without further ado, and to be honest it passed me by.

LIKE every non-attached human under the age of one hundred who is keen to pair up with another, you are probably internet dating.

IT is a universal truth that a single parent in a chaotic household will be in want of a dog.

PICTURE this. The changing rooms in a health club. Two ladies in expensive tennis gear, lightly sweating, zipping their racquets away. One is saying to the other: “I’m incandescent. He made an appointment with the builder to come at nine on Monday to redo the conservatory. He KNOWS I play tennis on Monday.”