Holy Mother of God, 16 weeks is considered a lot of maternity leave?! I've been thinking a lot about moving to the US recently, but that's really put me off.

If it comes down to good manners, what's the polite way to please guests who live in different places?

Absolutely. Friends complained that I was having a "destination wedding" because it would be expensive for them to attend… but if we'd had the wedding where those friends live, it would've been a "destination wedding" for other friends. Ridiculous.

Mine's a really common name, too, and it's almost never spelt correctly in England or the US. I tried to spell it out to help and it still ends up wrong. It's quite funny.

See also: Torpenhow Hill, which apparently means "Hillhillhill Hill", and all of these wonderfully tautological places.

I don't even think he was saying it in a "you look nice" way — I think it was more like "I enjoy this piece of abstract art" or something. (But he does also do the thing of saying "You are so pretty without make up!" when I'm actually wearing make up and he just can't tell.)

It never occurred to me that any blokes paid attention to the sort of make up I wear until one day I was wearing liquid eyeliner with flicks out either side and my husband said, "Ooh, I like those little lines on top of your eyes".

My eyebrows are tiny thin little things (my parents' fault, not teenaged-me going wild with the tweezers) and a few years ago I learnt to fill them in and now I kind of love them. I use a super cheap Rimmel pencil (I love it so much I bought a bunch of the same one) that has a little brush thing on the lid — first I…

Here's my favourite recent vocal-frier: Jessica Hynes' character in Twenty Twelve.

I have a colleague whose speech is incredibly fast, unbelievably quiet and puncuated with a sort of nervous mini giggle. She does the same nervous mini giggle noise before she speaks, between phrases, after she speaks and whenever anyone speaks to her. I thought it was because she was nervous starting her new job, but…

I had a flatmate in uni who did not sound at all childlike ordinarily, but whenever she was on the phone to her boyfriend or dad went spectacularly babytalk-y. The rest of us were killing ourselves laughing at it, but it was also a bit disturbing. After a while we asked her about it and she swore she didn't speak any…

Oh wow; I've never actually thought about this before but when I read your comment I realised that I absolutely do that when I do a fake SoCal accent.

I liked it enough to watch the whole series, but for some reason I felt like I didn't enjoy it as much as I really, really wanted to. I can't put my finger on why.

For a split second I thought that was Feliciano Lopez, but then I realised that Feliciano Lopez is prettier than Pettyfer.

Yes. YES.

Bands/singers do this *all the time*. It's super annoying at festivals, when no one knows which acts you're allowed to shoot and which you aren't. And then sometimes you're one of the lucky ones given permission to shoot an act but then security doesn't know that and won't let you in, etc. And then there are concerts…

My mum's in a choir and she has a fantastically terrible choir leader: the woman is tone deaf, very loud and thinks she's the 50-something, English Catholic version of Mariah Carey. It's hilarious. I'm not sure if being in that particular choir would be more of less stressful.

SERIOUSLY.

I have a friend whose boyfriend was involved in the local music scene — not famous, just involved behind the scenes. She *frequently* got things free because she would say "I'm XX XX's girlfriend". We made fun of her for it all the time but then she would get *us* what we wanted sometimes, too, so we let it slide……

My department gets bacon sandwiches for a mid-morning snack at least twice a week.