It is a well-documented fact that I feel very strongly about stationery. This has been thus for as long as I remember. My earliest memories are from primary school when I frequented the only stationery shop in the small town my family lived in. Their selection was not exactly something to write home about (pun!), but they nevertheless stocked a nice assortment of fragrant erasers shaped like characters from the Care Bears.

The conscious consumer that I was at the ripe age of seven, it had somehow come to my attention that sniffing such innocent-looking fragrant school supplies could, in fact, cause cancer. I wasted no time with rushing to alarm the shopkeeper, a nice enough older lady who would let me hover around in her shop for days on end, obviously not ever making an actual purchase.

Over three decades later I still remember the look on the lady’s face when I told her off for selling cancerous merchandise camouflaged as children’s stationery, with all the authority of an annoyingly precocious kid that I was. Not wanting to have anything to do with such a place, I promptly took my business elsewhere, which in this case was the stationery isle of a supermarket while my parents did their groceries shopping.

I carefully follow stationery-related trends and buy books about typography without any actual or imaginary calligraphy skills of my own. Thus the fact that ​suspiciously many fashion brands have recently changed their brand logos has not escaped me. More curiously, it appears that they all are using exactly the same typeface. Have a look at the updated logos of Burberry, Celine (without the accent aigu), Balenciaga, Saint Laurent(that’s Yves Saint Laurent with Yves dropped off, because first names are no longer in fashun) and Balmain.

They all look exactly the same. Coincidence? 

Another issue I need to get off my chest is the Yoko Ono of the 2010s – Meghan Markle. Now that she’s momentarily stuck between no longer being The Bride and not yet having fulfilled her job in the Royal Family ie. produced an heir, she’s getting a bit of beating in the press. I understand this, because this is how the press works.

I understand that she’s become the evil witch who tore apart the band of brotherhood between William and Harry (they lost their mother when they were young, and the mother was no other than England’s Rose, and Elton John has a song to prove it!), because her un-British bitchness resulted in Harry no longer partaking in the Royal Family Christmas tradition of shooting pheasants. She had it coming, no? I mean who loves pheasants so much as to ban husband from killing them for giggles?

You put yourself in a royal fishbowl, you take the crap that comes with being under the watchful (and menacing) eye of the universe. Yet I have the feeling she’s principally being hunted by a couple of men: most notably the British media personality Piers Morgan and her very own father. I am aware that I do not have to consult shit British media and then be all wound up about it, but this has bothered me (to the extent that frivolous things such as overprivileged people with their issues bother me). 

Why are we still branding women as witches?

I am asking still, because I just visited one of my favourite places, the Castle Hill in Edinburgh, which also happens to be a famous arena where women were burned as witches in the 16th century. While Meghan Markle has not exactly been declared an actual witch, there’s much of that rhetoric around her. Harry has lost so much weight! She must have cast a crazy “Hollywood diet and yoga” spell on poor emaciated Harry! Also, she made her sister-in-law cry ​at the wedding dress rehearsal! Her servants escaping the palace en masse! 

These were some of the most pressing issues that have bothered me today.

Needless to say, I am on holiday.