I'm at a drinks party at a neighbour's house in Ealing, west London. 'Have you seen Lila's new kitchen extension?,' a woman asks, glass of prosecco in hand.
My partner Paul and I are sitting on the sofa watching a couple passionately make love on a kitchen counter. It's that classic unrealistic kind of sex that you see only on TV.
I'm browsing the Netflix menu and it's littered with lovely Christmas rom-coms. Stories where the beautiful heroine faces a difficult challenge, wonders if she'll ever find love again.
Sobriety coaches often say that this is the bit where you should feel smug and more interesting without booze, but honestly for me it was often the opposite.
It was the friend of a client who made me bang my head against the table. I was working in Somerset when the woman popped in and asked if I was thinking of moving down there from London.
At a cosmetic clinic in London, the nurse explained the concept of the 'golden ratio' to me - a mathematical formula used to assess and measure beauty.