It’s Monday and I hate them; my Hoover has stopped working, my youngest son sat on my Kindle and the screen has scrambled, with four books recently downloaded which is even more irritating. Ellie has just told me that petrol is £1.39 a litre. My TV license needs renewing. I have to MOT, tax and service my daughter’s car before she takes it back to uni so there goes the housekeeping for this month and the OH and I will be going on an enforced diet! Maybe I should be buying a lottery ticket because I am not sure our household income is keeping up with inflation, certainly not the cost of our children.

I came home, made a cup of coffee and read that the French paparazzi photographer, who took those invasive pictures of Kate, must be having a worse Monday than me though. Earlier this month he gets a tip off that the royal couple are staying in a villa in Provence and so he drives out there and from 700yds he looks through his lens and sees the pair sunbathing around the pool and Kate is topless! A few grainy pics later he is hurtling back to Paris to sell the pictures thinking he has won the lottery. In France sunbathing topless is ‘de rigueur’ and so he probably did not think about the consequences when the editor of Closer purchased his photos, all he thought about was the money he had earned. Today he wakes up to the prospect of an expensive court case and possibly a prison sentence and probably wishing that he could turn the clocks back.

And then my mobile bleeps and I open up the message from a friend and my life suddenly gets put back into perspective and I am humbled….she is sitting by the bedside of her 17 year old child in Intensive Care and she has just been told that, following an accident and two weeks in a coma, he has irreversible brain damage and next time his heart stops they will not resuscitate him. She, together with her husband and daughter, are living on the edge of hell, their life has been put on pause and I am not sure how they are ever going to get it started again but they will as they are strong and that’s what happens life does go on just never the same and probably never as good.

It is times like these that make one realise how lucky we are. How can I moan about a broken Kindle, the cost of living rising when I have a friend who would give up all her Kindles and Hoovers just to have the life and health of her son returned to her. My Kindle can be replaced, her son never can.