'As you pick your way through life, take time to smell the flowers.' I remember that maxim vividly, because it popped up around me so often when I was a teenager in Bombay. Some of my neighbours would have little wooden plaques engraved with those words, while others even had them embroidered on cushions for reasons I have yet to fathom. Another popular one was this: 'I am the Boss of this house and I have my wife's permission to say so.'

I didn't judge the people who had these plaques and cushions lying around their living rooms, because we didn't have satellite television or social media in those days, giving us no one to benchmark our neighbours against. It was a simpler, less bitchy time. Interestingly, while both those maxims were meant to be amusing, both were untrue.