MY MIDDLE daughter is one of those people who really wants something, until she gets it.

She wanted to go trampolining, so badly, until she did. Within seconds of the one-hour slot I’d queued and paid for, she appeared, panting and demanding an ice-lolly.

I told her she could have one when she finished the session. I had it waiting for her. On the way over to me, she saw a Slush Puppy machine and wanted one of them instead.

It’s hard to teach kids the value of money.

I remember, as a twenty-something, having less than a pound for lunch each day after paying rent and bills.

I could have made sandwiches, but I lived with my brother who would have stolen and eaten them.

Luckily, I worked at a company with subsidised café. I could get a jacket potato and soup for 75 pence. I ate a lot of jacket potatoes.

On payday I treated myself to a box of Birdseye potato waffles.

Now I’m older, I can’t cane the carbs like I used to, but potato will always have a special place in my heart.

I know we are supposed to shun all beige food and eat everything raw and green, but if I finally snap and murder the husband, my death row meal would include Smash.

To be fair to my daughter, her enthusiastic greed is trumped by her emotional intelligence and kindness.

I hid behind a pillar and watched her. She was in a queue, and each time she got to the front, she let the person behind her go.

I asked her later why she did it and she shrugged and said “they really liked it on there”. I can teach her to be more frugal, but I can never teach her how to be thoughtful. She just is.

Last weekend I Marie Kondo’d my house.

For those who don’t know, Marie Kondo is a Japanese organising consultant who goes into people’s homes, makes them throw away half their stuff, then teaches them how to fold what’s left neatly.

First off, she kneels on the floor and thanks the house.

Her philosophy is to “touch everything in your house. If it does not bring you joy, thank it and give it away.”

By lunchtime, all my skinny jeans were in a pile on the garden wall, alongside a variety of cooking implements, the cat litter tray, and the husband.

I’ve made some business cards proclaiming me a “British organising consultant” and am waiting for the business to start rolling in.

It’s amazing that we now live in a world where we need someone to explain how to tidy up. We buy books we don’t have the time to read, that teach us how to do things we don’t have the time to do.

We download apps on our smartphones to remind us how to take time out of looking at our smartphones, then spend five minutes watching ice melt on a screen to calm us down before we go back to scrolling and tapping, like birds in cages.

How did we cope when we didn’t have email and everywhere closed for the weekend? What was it like when we had to wait for a reply to a letter, and what did we do while we waited?

I vaguely remember Sundays spent on dog walks because there was “nothing better to do.” Now we can go shopping all day on Sunday, then out to the cinema. I don’t know if I’d have remembered those trips as well as I remember going on that dog walk each Sunday, to the same woods where two trees had merged together. It’s forever merged in my memory.

Three women are making news this week. Heidi Allen, Sarah Wollaston and Anna Soubry. All ex-Conservative MPs who refuse to be “dragged to the cliff-edge of a no deal”, by a party that is “increasingly abandoning its principles and values with a shift to the right of politics”.

Their in-your face resignation letter ended with “our politics needs urgent and radical reform and we are determined to play our part”. I’m hoping someone starts printing that on T-shirts.

As the kids would say #micdrop #exitbuilding.

They joined the independent group, alongside eight Labour MPs, and now have as many members as the Lib Demsy. With a government that holds no majority, 11 MP’s can command surprising strength. They are like political Power Rangers.

The only hope when things get as bad as they are, is that it forces change. Brave people, like Heidi, Sarah and Anna, stand up and say “we deserve better, we can do better, and we are going to fight for better”.

They are a symbol of hope, and reminder to us all to constantly take stock of ourselves, our choices, our principles.