I’ve been thinking for a while now about donating some eggs. I don’t mean as a weird raffle prize or anything, I’m talking my actual eggs. Part of me. From my ovaries. You get the picture.

I’ve never had any trouble getting pregnant, even at times when I didn’t really mean to. First time round, at 16, it obviously wasn’t planned. The second time, it was a conscious choice, but I remember it more as a ‘yeah, having a baby might be quite nice to do at some point, let’s see what happens…’ sort of decision. A bit like considering a weekend at Centre Parcs. A few weeks off the pill though and bam. Baby on board.

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I’ve always thought of myself as a reasonably organised type of person. I don’t have years of old newspapers piled in corners, hideously out of date clothes hanging in my wardrobe, or an attic full of faulty televisions and broken Christmas decorations. I’m not hugely sentimental and have never considered myself a hoarder.

Just recently though, I’ve begun to wonder whether this sense of orderliness has less to do with my personality, and more to do with the fact that I have moved house a lot. In my 32 years, I have lived in over 20 different houses. Moving so frequently, you just don’t have the time to build up collections of junk you don’t need. You’re forced to continually sort and review your possessions, and if you know you’re going to probably be packing, moving and unpacking within the next couple of years, it makes you think twice about holding onto things ‘just in case’.

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I have been reading this week about David Cameron’s plans for a national happiness audit.

You have to wonder how this came about. Was Cameron sat at his Very Important Desk one day, fiddling with his iPad, thinking to himself “You know what, I’m just not sure how people are feeling about the slashing of NHS budgets, mass redundancy across the public sector and brutal welfare reform – I know! I’ll spend millions commissioning a survey to ask them!”

Seems a bit weird doesn’t it?

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No, is the short answer. But that wouldn’t make great reading, so I will try and expand…

I want to believe in the idea that at some point in my life, I will meet somebody and know. Know that this is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with, the person who completes me, the person I will love forever. But I don’t believe it. It’s a lovely idea, but in my mind completely unreasonable. How can you say that you will love somebody forever? How can you know?

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I make no secret of the fact that I don’t like housework. If you’ve read my fantastic housework tips you’ll probably have cottoned on to the fact that I am not a clean freak.

It’s really not that I’m lazy, it’s just that I find it boring and ultimately pointless. I don’t mind a bit of light tidying now and again, the kind where you can throw away satisfying piles of paper and arrange things in height or colour order, but actual cleaning, it’s just so relentless. As the fabulous Joan Rivers once said, “I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again.”

So when Danielle Raine offered me a copy of her new book, Housework Blues, I was intrigued. The book describes itself as less of a ‘how to’, and more of a ‘why bother’, a guide to help you cope with the mental and emotional challenge of keeping a home. It sounded perfect…

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Ever caught the eye of a handsome stranger across a pile of 3-for-2s in your local bookshop and wished you could strike up a conversation? Or maybe you’ve got chatting to someone in a supermarket and it’s led to happily ever after? If Hollywood blockbusters and American TV shows are to be believed, single thirty-somethings are forever meeting potential partners in the dairy aisle and securing dates in art galleries. But does this kind of chance encounter ever happen in real life?

Social anthropologist and relationship expert Jean Smith is living proof that it does. Jean has travelled the world studying human behaviour, looking in particular at how humans flirt. Jean herself has met partners simply by striking up conversations in cafes and at bus stops, and for the last seven years has been passing on her skills and experiences through her own interactive flirting seminars and tours.

In your twenties it was easy to get chatting to people in bars and clubs, but once you get to a certain age, and would rather have a nice sit down somewhere quiet, trawling bars losses its appeal. This can leave single women wondering just how to meet like minded men. So, in the name of ‘journalism’, (honest), I recently decided to test out one of Jean’s ‘flirting tours of London’, hoping to pass on some top tips to single women everywhere.

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I know I’m not the only person who questions exactly what the point of life is. It’s pretty bizarre after all isn’t it? You’re born, you are encouraged to accumulate all kinds of material possessions you don’t need, you die. The End.

Along the way, we are bombarded with ideas and images of ‘happiness’ – the books we should read, the places we should visit, the money we need to earn to be happy. It feels like there is a lot of pressure to strive for more and more extreme ways of achieving happiness, as though the only path to personal fulfillment involves skydiving off the Eiffel Tower, en route to a trek, barefoot, through some obscure mountain range.

Personally, I’m more a fan of life’s simple pleasures. (Read here about my perfect day with Colin Firth and some bagels…). I’ve always thought this was mainly down to laziness or a lack of imagination on my part, but a survey published in the Daily Mail today shows I am not alone. You could say of course that empathising with Daily Mail readers isn’t exactly something to boast about, but the survey was actually conducted on behalf of Radio 3, so I think that’s ok…

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Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo as it’s known to its chums. While several of my friends spend the month  of Movember growing moustaches in the name of raising awareness about cancers affecting men, I will be endeavouring to bang out 50,000 words of a novel.

The basic principle is this – most of us believe we Have A Book In Us. It’s one of those givens in life isn’t it? At some point in our lives we’ve all thought we could be the next J K Rowling. We just can’t be bothered. The aim of NaNoWriMo then isn’t to create a masterpiece, or to spend hours a day carefully crafting sentences, it is just to write, to make the time to sit down and actually get some words on a page. It doesn’t matter how good they are, it’s a matter of quantity rather quality, creating the habit of writing rather than thinking about writing and then getting tired and watching repeats of CSI instead. On the website, you can create a profile, monitor your progress, and link up with other writers. You can even share your work if you are feeling brave.

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