Jackie Danicki has been on a roll lately. Her last two posts about women and life—“Truman Capote and the rewards of the mundane and unexpected” and “The real meaning of ‘equality’, and why most feminists are anything but ‘pro-choice’“—have been gems. A lot of female newspaper columnists follow the “Polly Filler” template of complaining for five paragraphs about the terrible burdens of being a rich metropolitan mum with an even richer husband, imagining this somehow makes them representative of Women In Britain, and then demanding that the government do something about their “problems”. Jackie’s approach is more like: “Life is hard and involves unavoidable trade-offs; my life is mostly a good one; my happiness is neither the government’s responsibility nor its business; get over it.” I might even start buying a “serious” newspaper again if one of the broadsheets hired someone like her. Go, girl!

(Do you think I could get a column in The Guardian called something like “How the White Man gone done me wrong and that’s why He now owes me a livin'”? Hmm. Possibly not while Gary Younge is still working there.)