Sunflowers are the embodiment of familiarity and cheerfulness. But there is something slightly oppressive about that huge omniscient eye

Eastern European soul food, for me, begins in Bangkok. Where else would one expect to find an expert on chicken paprikash? My family’s last surviving one lives there, with a street cat called Mango and her half-Thai, quarter-Indian, quarter-Hungarian-Jewish, entirely American grandson.

I don’t understand the point of garden visits. Why do ordinary people, the owners of mere balconies and tiny yards, torment themselves by touring other people’s grand estates? Nut trees, stables, ancestral compost heaps: I need no reminder of what I am missing.

For most of us, apartment dwellers and city types, houseplants are an admission of defeat. We look wistfully at plants in the supermarket—tendrils and fronds, furry flaps, spines and holes and soft neon shoots—persuading ourselves that they might bring us comfort.

Only two years ago, when I was finishing my memoir of gardening obsession, “Rhapsody in Green,” I claimed that I had no time for houseplants. Prickly, diminutive, macramé-reliant: I’d rarely been less tempted by anything.

Ordinarily, my garden and I are embarrassing to be around. I can’t keep my hands off it; visitors, work, and children are all mere obstacles on the path of true pleasure.

Oh, America: blue breakfast cereals and string made of fruit are not perfectly normal childhood foodstuffs. Your young are corrupted by pleasure. Unfortunately, I was too.

I say “autumn,” you say “fall.” Obviously, I’m right. But maybe we can compromise with “harvest,” the season’s traditional name. At this time of year, anyway, what one really needs is adjectives, and “fall-like” just won’t do.

Like virtually every bookish child in the Western world, I inherited certain lessons from Laura Ingalls Wilder. Reading the “Little House on the Prairie” series as a girl, I believed three things: that my future womanly waist would be small enough for Pa’s hands to encircle; that snow could freeze maple syrup into delightful snacks; and that the secret to security and happiness lay in preserving fruits and vegetables for winter.

Flowers, pah! They’re just a waste of space. The novelist on why her garden is all about ‘growing stuff that I can eat’

Resolutions are for teenagers. Once we’re adults, we no longer need to start the year with self-loathing, failure and shame. Give blood, walk more, donate to charity, wear your favourite clothes, find a therapist, stroke pets.

Please don’t say that I’m alone. Or perhaps I am, and that’s why I do it. Yes, I know some of you, the captains of industry, the retired teachers, were forced to learn bushels of poetry, in the good old days. You can declaim “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” and “I wandered lonely as a cloud” if called upon . . . but you never are. Memorising couplets may train your intellect, and keep the great voices of the canon alive but, otherwise, does it sustain you?

Like the average middle-class English person, I was pretty confident about Italy. I had schlepped round Florence, felt Jamesian in Venice, almost driven off a vineyard wall in Montepulciano. Now it was time for Rome.

I am definitely not a hoarder. Trust me: I know. If my parents ever move house, it would be simpler to hire a wrecking ball.

How dare they? Oxford is my hometown; I love it. No, I hate it. Most importantly, I know it. But I never gave permission for it to change.

People of Europe, don’t go to Moscow. You may think you are prepared, with your ultra-light down gilets and ankle boots, your vague memory of a school performance of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, your last-minute listen to Sting’s 1985 classic “Russians”, with the line that blew my, I mean your, teenage mind: “Russians love their children too.” But you are simply not tough enough. Stick to Lisbon; St Petersburg, if you’re feeling adventurous. But not Moscow.

There’s nothing wrong with optimism, as long as you don’t get your hopes up. If one really wants something, it’s easy to put doubts aside. This time will be the exception; bad boyfriends changed into princes, strangely easy childbirth, jars of honey waved through in our carry-on luggage . . . surely, for me, it’ll work out.

Charlotte Mendelson salutes an underrated author with no time for happy endings or comeuppances

There is always lunch.

Adulthood is hard, we are all doomed and even the small joys which make life almost worth living – a perfect kiss, a baby’s screw-on toes – aren’t necessarily there the moment one needs them. A wonderful soul-enriching delicious lunch, however, is achievable. Necessary, even. And, luckily for us, it doesn’t require suckling pig, caviar, ortolans. Not now; not in May. The answer is salad.