It started with coffee, as every day should. Only my coffee had been replaced with the ashes of a rotten bear that had been cremated in a car. I nearly puked. This came as a shock, since I’d been sticking my nose in the depths of the coffee jar for weeks in a desperate hope that I’d be able to smell something – anything. This wasn’t what I was looking for.

Stop for a moment and look around you. You don't know how anything you can see was made, what's in it, or how it works, do you? You live in a world where everything you wear, eat, use and consume is a mystery. This is the only time in human history when mankind has been surrounded by a world it doesn't understand. And I think it's a really, really big problem.

I was lying in bed last night, staring at the wall (Wait! Stay there! It gets more interesting…). There’s a chimney breast sticking into the bedroom, so I was actually staring at three walls – the breast, the side of the breast and the wall. And the walls are all exactly the same shade of pale green. I know this is a fact because I painted them, in an attempt to get all Farrow and Ball-y in the new house a couple of years ago. Only, from my spot in bed, the walls weren’t the same colour at all.

Have you ever held a wine glass to your lips and thought, “I could just bite this. What would happen if I did?” Or looked over a cliff-side railing and had to fight the urge to leap? Even if you’re a cautious person, not a reckless bone in your body, you will have had a moment when a dramatic, dangerous and potentially painful action has flashed across your mind.

The sun is shining and we’re trying not to equate every warming beam with impending global climate catastrophe. Flowers are in bloom. The world is good, right? Excellent. So you’re in the perfect place to go on a little imaginative journey.

If my email inbox was a terrible 1980s faux-political anthem, it would be Latin Quarter’s Radio Africa. I literally only ever hear bad news. And despite the protection offered by the mental barricades I’ve worked so hard to build, this news does start to break through. Through the Barricades, as it were.

A couple of years ago, I was pretty close to giving up. How close? I’m not sure it really matters. I didn’t die, although I could have. I did cry, almost to the point where I couldn’t any more.

The technicalities of Brexit are lost on many people, some of them influential members of backbench MP groups. There’s no shame if the ins and outs of a customs union elude you, or a backstop is someone who tried to prevent the ball rolling into the road in rounders.