Oh my god that is horrifying. Mostly I escape this sort of attention through a combination of being a) old, b) fat and c) awesome resting bitchy face. Also reading, headphones, pretending not to understand a word of whatever language they are speaking and a thousand yard stare.

I see your mid-30s dramas and raise you a friend who got her mid-life crisis off to a (literal) bang with an affair with an ex. This was then exploded by her husband all over their corner of social media. It reached soap opera levels of drama, which would have been entertaining, but their oldest kid is almost a…

Big hugs to everyone for whom this strikes a chord. And thank you for writing this, Mark.

Oh do I know this. Requests for funding from male colleagues approved based on a short pitch of mainly hot air. Frequently fail / waste of time and money.

Later, be on receiving end of jokes about your “War and Peace” emails.

When I was a young teen we would cut crotches out of a pair of thick tights to make a hole for our heads, and the feet off so that the legs became arms, and then pull it over to make a sexy and appealing tight crop top, which looked exactly like a crop top made from a pair of tights.

Or cheese. I mean, cheese is amazing and doesn't taste even slightly like water.

I would probably never played wedding as a little girl, except that my younger brother was OBSESSED with it when he was 4-5. We were really close in age and played together a lot, and he would refuse to play anything except weddings. This usually meant I had to play act the priest when he married his teddies, or do…

Thank you for the empathy ((hug)). It was a very long time ago. I’m old enough now to understand mum had a lot of problems, but also old enough to know her way of handling them isn’t my problem either. So the good thing is it doesn’t hurt. Instead all that I feel about it is a weird sort of awkwardness that this kind…

My uncle is Japanese and when we were kids we loved and adored all Japanese food and it was a big treat to visit with our cousins. So many amazing tiny packaged things! So many weird things (raw fish, seaweed, sweet bean stuff, tofu, natto) we could gross our friends out by eating! Restaurants where you had to take…

No idea at all. My friends all used tampons pretty much from the get-go. And one of my fondest memories of school was coming into our big bathroom and finding a group of 13-year-old girls standing outside a toilet cubicle coaching one of their friends inside on how to insert a tampon correctly.

So do I! And I always forget how ridiculously easy it is to make. It really is so easy. And then it is delicious, and can go in yogurt and on toast, and lo! Life is good.

I’m on Project Clean The Fridge Out, and turned a manly butternut squash, the last of the dates and the rest of a bag of prunes into a not half-bad pan of brownies. Also made some lemon curd with the last of the lemons, and seed crackers just because. With all this fibre, I’m feeling very positive about the near-term…

What’s weird is that when we were teens, my older brother used to call Saville and Harris paedos quite casually. He’d picked it up from friends at school. He went to school with quite a few kids of media / acting / culture types. Anyhow we talked about it a bit after all the stuff about Saville came out and he said it…

The pubic hair everywhere would have really got to me. But my worst housemates everywhere were 2 best friends who I shared with at uni. They did the following:

Oh this line of argument enrages me. I was raised in a “spare the rod” family and my father beat us (he didn’t bother to nicefy the language) with a special wooden stick and a leather belt. My mother slapped me, hit me, and pulled my hair. Or just handed us over to our father. It was all in the name of “discipline.”…

My Dad, oddly, introduced me to the concept of “mad money” when I was a kid, which he got from his mum. He and she both used to regularly give me a bit extra as “mad money” when I was a kid, with instructions to save it for when I was really in trouble. Then it was in case I needed to get a taxi home or something, but…

Alas for the beads. With them, that would have been level 10 packing wizard status. The beads make the woman, after all.

Weirdly, I once ended up on holiday with a travel editor for one of the glossy Condé Nast mags. Or rather, I was on holiday, she was working. She had two enormous suitcases for 5 days, and spent most of her time in a single sheer leopard print cover-up, wearing masses of beaded jewellery, sunglasses so large they…

You are completely amazing. And if you would care to have an iron-clad alibi and a flamethrower, I am happy to help arrange matters.