Emma Beddington

Trump can have his ‘victory days’. I want something to commemorate Britain’s love of Judi Dench, or its hatred of a sleepless night

I’m not being deliberately contrarian – I am a person of peace – but I’ve decided bank holidays are rubbish. They are on my mind because May is peak season for them, but also because handsome and intelligent President Trump (listen, my son is moving to the US this summer and it would be nice to visit occasionally) has recently announced two new public holidays. Not that he wants anyone to take time off for them, of course.

The generations are more segregated than ever. Yet we have so much in common

I’ve always felt a bit pathetic for not having a proper peer group. In dark moments, it feels like a moral failing and an indictment of my social skills. In kinder moments I recognise it’s also partly a product of being sick and sad at university, then successively too pregnant, too preoccupied with babies and too peripatetic to make or maintain ties. In calmer times, I’ve forged slightly more of a social life, but mostly it’s not made up of my gen X peers, but rather people who are occasionally younger, usually significantly older. Now I’m wondering – am I lucky?

Morning, noon and night, it’s there, whirring and whirling around. It’s so industrious I feel simultaneously scared and shamed

In domestic news, an issue has arisen with the robot vacuum cleaner. Our noisy old one annoyed me so much, bashing repeatedly into the skirting and swallowing rug tassels in confusion, that I stamped violently on its off button every time I caught it trying to do its job.

The new one is less relentlessly stupid, but just as loud, and since my husband programmed it, it appears to always be on. It lurches out at 10am and is still roaring around when I come downstairs, hours later. After a brief hiatus, it re-emerges in the afternoon. It’s so noisily industrious, I feel simultaneously enervated and shamed by its productivity. Let me stare at the internet in peace, robot!