How to lose your head when all about you are keeping theirs and looking boringly normal

1) Read your favourite huge Sesame Street book when things get tough even though you're 35.

2) Draw butterflies everywhere and make butterfly pictures with Lentilky [Smarties] in an attempt to bring bright new beginnings in your life by focussing on the biggest transformation nature has provided.

3) Live in total denial of having to move out of your flat until the last minute, other than tentatively looking at a few flats and pretending you have enough money to rent them.

4) Tell yourself it's going to be ok, repeatedly and out loud so you are now not only totally lying to yourself, but talking to yourself out loud.

5) Wear glamourous high heeled shoes indoors for the sheer hell of it.

6) Shout at your boyfriend about how you have never wanted to live with anyone ever and you never wanted to do the conventional thing and have kids and that you just want a f**king career so that's why you're dreading moving in with him.  (This will give him all the proof he needs that you're a super-bitch and you'll feel really bad about it afterwards but by then it'll be too late.)

7) Refuse to acknowledge that you will have to do this stupid job you hate all your life because you cannot start accepting the outside truth about things or that would send your whole world crumbling around your feet.

8) Wear that black shorts jumpsuit thing with a pink scarf tied around your waist even though you know it makes you look fat and is particularly difficult to get in and out of when you want to go to the loo.

9) Go to your boyfriend's place for the weekend because when you're totally stressed out it's a super-duper time to be with someone with a short temper and you're a glutton for punishment at heart.

10) Drink cherry tea and eat cherry-filled chocolate and lust after cherry jam like there are no other flavours worth having in the whole world.

11) Forget that the washing machine doesn't go onto a spin when you put it on the 'wool' setting and open it to see a flood of water coming out because you forgot YET AGAIN that the machine lets you do that when it shouldn't and go berserk at it while gathering towels and cursing it at the top of your voice at 11.30pm when you should have finished doing the laundry by then anyway.

12) Go to bed at 20 past midnight and tell yourself you'll still be able to get up at 6.

13) Write a stupid blogpost about how insane you are just to list the evidence for future reference to the police who will surely find you in a heap on the floor in due course.