Maybe when this is history, I will read about it, but for now I would rather escape it.

The new path to personal happiness is to dispose of almost everything you own. Adherents of this philosophy write online – evidently you can keep your laptop – that living this way frees them from the angst of ownership and consumerism.

Good on them, but that life is not for me. There is a spectrum of acquisitiveness that runs from people who choose to live with little (as distinct from people who already have little but would prefer a little more) to people who can’t move for all the stuff they’ve accumulated.

I am a collector of china. One day, I saw on Instagram a photo of a cupboard of china that made me think its owner had slightly tipped the scale from “collecting” to “mental health issue”, and on consideration I realised it looked exactly like mine.

Iwent into a supermarket last Friday (yep, Good Friday, but everything was open – not that I am complaining about that) and an employee saw me wandering around and asked if he could help me find anything.

“Yes, please” I said, “Easter eggs”.

“Easter eggs?” he said, as though he’d never heard of them. “You mean plastic ones?” Like, what? I tell you, sometimes the cultural gulf is so wide.

I said, “No, chocolate ones.” They didn’t have any.