Sara Pascoe

There's nothing you can't tell to an audience, because they're all people who've had lives. The only thing they don't want to watch is someone who's really angry or out of control.'

It's unfair but true: youth is attractive, curvy women are attractive, outliers who look a bit different to everybody else are attractive.

When I was a small child we were allowed to wait up until midnight on 31 December. Then as the TV chimed, Dad would run to the front door and open it, welcoming the New Year air. This is the kind of entertainment you make in poor families, and cry to your therapist about when you're rich.

Belief is invisible, so there is enough space for everyone's. Except in the shops at Christmas.

While all religious beliefs should be respected, choice is a human right.

That's the thing: when I listen on public transport, my headphones act as a separator - a wired barrier between me and the nearest people. Yet my podcasts drag me through the depths of human nature.

Skinniness is a new fashion. It reflects an obsession with youth, a suggestion of pre-adolescence when a female's fertility can be dominated. It implies vulnerability, feebleness and fragility.

If we accept ourselves as animals, and have empathy and tolerance, compassion to others, understand that humans are territorial, aggressive and have gender aspects, then we can change things.

Watching the news, there seems to be an empathy failure and miscommunication.

If you view history as a backdrop, set-dressing or fiction, then 'Pride and Prejudice' is hugely entertaining. My reread saw the misery of the female characters' reality. My new reaction was sadness and fury. Knowledge ruins everything!

I wore a padded bra every single day and night from the age of 14 until I was 31. Giving up padding was my New Year's resolution. I had known for ages that wearing a stuffed bra was a form of hiding my real body.

We parcel up time into years and months and days because without compartmentalisation the tundra of time is impossible to navigate.