I have discovered perfection, the perfect colour; it is red-and-blue.

Flowers, pah! They’re just a waste of space. The novelist on why her garden is all about ‘growing stuff that I can eat’

Baths are the perfect place for murder: self-contained, soundproof, easily sluiced. And crime fiction is the greatest analgesic. When life is particularly grisly, we don’t have time for idiots falling in love, or Britain’s glorious hedgerows.

Resolutions are for teenagers. Once we’re adults, we no longer need to start the year with self-loathing, failure and shame. Give blood, walk more, donate to charity, wear your favourite clothes, find a therapist, stroke pets.

Please don’t say that I’m alone. Or perhaps I am, and that’s why I do it. Yes, I know some of you, the captains of industry, the retired teachers, were forced to learn bushels of poetry, in the good old days. You can declaim “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” and “I wandered lonely as a cloud” if called upon . . . but you never are. Memorising couplets may train your intellect, and keep the great voices of the canon alive but, otherwise, does it sustain you?

Like the average middle-class English person, I was pretty confident about Italy. I had schlepped round Florence, felt Jamesian in Venice, almost driven off a vineyard wall in Montepulciano. Now it was time for Rome.

I am definitely not a hoarder. Trust me: I know. If my parents ever move house, it would be simpler to hire a wrecking ball.

How dare they? Oxford is my hometown; I love it. No, I hate it. Most importantly, I know it. But I never gave permission for it to change.

People of Europe, don’t go to Moscow. You may think you are prepared, with your ultra-light down gilets and ankle boots, your vague memory of a school performance of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, your last-minute listen to Sting’s 1985 classic “Russians”, with the line that blew my, I mean your, teenage mind: “Russians love their children too.” But you are simply not tough enough. Stick to Lisbon; St Petersburg, if you’re feeling adventurous. But not Moscow.

There’s nothing wrong with optimism, as long as you don’t get your hopes up. If one really wants something, it’s easy to put doubts aside. This time will be the exception; bad boyfriends changed into princes, strangely easy childbirth, jars of honey waved through in our carry-on luggage . . . surely, for me, it’ll work out.