I spend a lot of my life in planes and airports. A lot of my life. And in the course of collecting air mile after air mile* I have picked up a few tips that make life easier. They're not all budget tips, mind...

1. Charge your phone on the way to the loo

Some airports have charging stations in public areas, and those airports are buildings of wondrous joy. Most airports don't care whether or not you need to charge devices mid-journey, unless you're one of the lucky ones with lounge access, in which case life is wonderful wherever you are. When you're desperate for a quick charge, you're more likely to find unguarded plug sockets in those long halls on the way to the loo than you are anywhere else. Just travel with a universal plug adaptor in your hand 
luggage and you'll be fine. Or fly Emirates, which has USB connections in every seat, enabling you to charge your phone as you fly. I love Emirates.

You're a good feminist, right? You give your children gender-neutral choices in the toy shop, you read them bedtime stories with excellent role models of the male and female persuasion, and you encourage sons and daughters alike to pursue their interests without pushing them into hobbies society deems appropriate depending on their chromosomal configuration. I'm sure you do.

And you might have a girly-girl for a daughter, and an uhr-boy for a son. And that's fine, if that's what they want to be. We're all about acceptance around these parts.

Do women know less about politics than men?

That's a ridiculous question, right? Just think about the people you know. Does it really seem like one sex know way more about politics than the other? (Important side note: if you are only friends with one sex, I don't want to tell you you're doing it wrong. But you might well be.)

But of course, that's just anecdata. Whereas the statement 'women know less about politics than men' is based on research. Specifically, research funded by the  Economic and Social Research Council.

The study took place in ten countries: Australia, Canada, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Norway, the UK and the United States.

Wales has become the first country in the UK to change from an opt-in to an opt-out organ donation scheme. This means presumed consent - you can say that you don't want your organs to be donated, but if you don't state this wish properly, then they will be donated.

It's a system that's worked well elsewhere, and experts hope it will increase the number of organs available to those who need them. But it got us wondering about what we'd like to happen to our mortal remains after we pop our clogs. Death might be a subject we often shy away from, but people have come up with some interesting ideas in the past. Sadly the story about Walt Disney being frozen and part of one of the Disney World rides is apocryphal but it doesn't end there. Whether it's Jeremy Bentham, dissected in public and then preserved at University College London to stare at the students every morning. Or the people who get immortalised as part of the Body Worlds exhibition 

Before going to Glastonbury I spent probably a total of two evenings preparing outfits and make-up. I rummaged through my parents wardrobe for the perfect hat and long socks that said,

"yeah I just nonchalantly came across this vintage Panama...oh and these over the knee socks? Yeah they're just practical, they have nothing to do with giving me an air of Alexa Chung gauntness."

I'm hardly an expert on Edinburgh, but I do like me some Fringe. My first time up at the festival was in 1998, when I was sixteen and spending my first unsupervised month away from home. I had three jobs, was working about 20 hours a day, got hooked on ProPlus, and had a whale of a time.

Since then, I've only been back as a tourist. But I've still got a few handy hints for those of you who might be making their first trip to Auld Reekie this year.

Who's that guy? It's Nick!

Move over Jess. That guy in the stolen woman's A-line trench is mine! There's nothing like a little self-loathing eye candy to keep you watching sucrose soaked US sitcom. New Girl may have come on leaps and bounds since the pilot episode but Jess's flatmate Nick was the reason I kept on watching. His scruffy, self-deprecating ways and inability to care for tomatoes translated to loveable charm. School teacher Ms. Jessica Day saw it too and before long irritation gave way to goofing about, being shoulders to cry on during break ups and then becoming worryingly co-dependent (Jess stop being his 'cooler!'). My heart  began to flutter as I and Jess unwittingly fell for the 'hot to trot' Nick Miller. The episode with that kiss aired last week and everything changed. I am now obsessed with the man.

I hate the way I look in pictures. I tell people I'm too animated to be photogenic, that a freeze frame of my existence is always going to be unflattering because it fails to capture the essence of me, but the simple truth is I don't look great in photos. I lack the bone structure.

There are exceptions to prove the rule, naturally. In my late teens and early twenties, my best friend owned a magic digital camera that was ONLY capable of making me look magnificent. Post-hangover, mid-sweaty night out, it mattered not - any photo of me taken with that particular camera was fantastic. I should have stolen it.

And now that I work in a field heaving with professional photographers, I've learned that the pros can also make me look half-way decent. But years of looking awful in pictures have turned me into a Person Who Poses. If I'm not going to look attractive in a photo, I may as well get in on the joke early by hamming it up and looking as silly as possible, right?

Was anyone else slightly surprised, musically jostled even, by the news Mumford and Sons were a headline act at Glastonbury? Rolling Stones? Yes, huge following, massive back-catalogue, makes sense. Mumford and Sons? As one of the Squeamish team who shall remain nameless in fear of a Mumford and Sons fan backlash said: "Mumford and Sons aren't a headline act, they are a 'sitting around in the morning deciding who you are going to see later' act."

As Squeamish Louise (who may or may not have made that Mumford and Sons comment - you will never know and I'll never tell) noted in her Glastonbury article regarding Anya Pearson's women only festival posters: "The results? A lot of blank space. Those sausages take up a lot of room usually it seems. Without them, the few acts progressive enough to realise that ladies can do more than ting a triangle or shimmy their hips struggle to take up enough space to look like more than a printing error." We have come up with some women fronted acts that we would like to see headlining Glastonbury...

 I have an ambivalent relationship with summer. I was never a great fan of it before my diagnosis at fifteen, my legs chaffed on the hot walk home from school to the rhythm of my homemade mix tapes, my puckered pale skin burned into red raw silk and hot days were veiled in gritty dust. Since my diagnosis summer now also brings unexpected hypos, as the heat spins my metabolism into overdrive, and sometimes unexpected sugar highs, as the sun silently breaks down my little vials of insulin into a pointless smelling liquid.