Squeamish Bikini is a year old! High 5s and Friday 5s all round! It's been a year of fluctuating house styles, questioned feminism, trolls, spam and sea creatures. A constant throughout all of this has been the weekly  little whale that has been so kind as to offer up 5 things a week. It's been inspired by current affairs, feminist triumphs, misheard lyrics and personal bugbears.

On our birthday (OK our birthday was Wednesday but we had to keep with both tradition and alliteration – Wednesday 5 has no flow) we have decided it's a time for reflection, or stock take if you will. We have all browsed the archives and chosen our favourite Friday 5s, which has evolved from a Squeamish Kate and Louise collaboration to a Squeamish family listings feature. If you have a favourite you'd like to revisit tell us in the comments.

Goodness me, girls, girls, girls calm down. First Edwina Currie has half a mind to call Louise Mensch's mother and now Nadine Dorries has decided a blog on Conservative Home would be the best method of giving Mensch a piece of her mind. The MP for Mid Bedfordshire and abstinence only education campaigner attacked Mensch for resigning mid term and “without doubt, handed her seat to Labour”.

Describing her maternal feelings towards Prince Harry, (due to Dorries giving birth to a daughter in the same year Diana brought Harry into this world) she blasted (blasted!) Mensch's support for The Sun newspaper's decision to print the images everybody had already seen online. Using the Corby MP's Today interview as a jumping off point Dorries decided she had a couple of other things to get off her chest when it comes to Ms Mensch. 

Feminism. Even before Caitlin Moran launched her book How to be a Woman feminism has been finding itself brought up in conversation. A new unapologetic ownership of the word 'feminism' is rising up. American feminist magazine Bust interviews usually ask their interviewees if they are a feminist. A surprising amount of women would take the opportunity to distance themselves from woman's lib. Gwen Stefani, the woman who fronted No Doubt singing about how the boys in her band (it was the 90s – it was kinderwhore era - nobody grew up) got a different deal from her, who wrote the song Just a Girl, informed Bust in 2007 that she was not a feminist. This year the young women Kat Dennings, Tavi Gevinson and Mindy Kaling were all happy to discuss their feminism in Bust Magazine.

Like many of Britain’s pre-war motorsport heroes, Bill Wisdom became a racing name at Brooklands.

But unlike many of Britain’s pre-war motorsport heroes, Elsie “Bill” Wisdom was a woman.

In 1904, Elsie Wisdom was born, one of seven children and the family’s only girl. She spent her childhood playing with her brothers and their friends, and was quickly given the nickname Bill, as her competitive spirit and rough and tumble style of play was more suited to a boy than a girl. Or so they thought at the time, the mores of the era being somewhat different. 

None of us at Squeamish Bikini Towers have the pleasure (yet) of moonlighting as perfume namers. Perusing the perfume department suggests this is a fun, creative and increasingly challenging job. It seems perfume marketing departments have been reaching for their thesaurus and searching for words that seem like they might smell nice. And change your life of course. At a guess perfumers are trying to tap into a market that can only be described as the fragrantly belligerent demographic, how else do you explain perfumes called Insolence, Fracas, Manifesto and Unforgiveable?

Because we all know you are not a woman (or man) until you have found that signature scent (no it can't be body odour) we are striving to create (you don't make stuff in the beauty world) possible signature scents for you, dear readers. Something that with one whiff a complete stranger will be able to sum you up by. Here's what we've come up with...

I recall so clearly sitting at my desk in year 6 during quiet reading time. I remember the desk was one of those old fashioned models I'd yearned to sit at for years. One of the few privileges of reaching the last year of primary school, in all 3 schools I attended anyway, was to sit on benches during assembly and to have opening desks in class. The kind so old they had an inkwell and esoteric slang carved into them. Occasionally we could all make Mrs Walters wince as the desk lids came clattering down 'accidentally'. But it's quiet reading time, the desks are closed and the room is silent and I am reading Carrie's War.

It's actually quite possible that the room is not silent and there is fiddling and prodding and psst-psst-pssting going on in the background. But I am reading Carrie's War and the skull is in the pond and the house is burning and the curse is coming true as a train huffs and puffs Carrie away.

In the art world certain issues are often returned to time and time again. Issues such as funding, publicity and venue space are deservedly tackled by culture secretaries and writers alike. There is one issue however that is so sensitive people tend to avoid discussing it. Yet statistically you have a 1 in 4 chance of being affected by it (not really, I made that up). So why does this issue so rarely come up in conversation, why do we feel the need to side step this, specifically: What do you do when your friends' band is, frankly, rubbish?

My statistic might not be scientific but at a wild guess it is safe to say you, dear reader, have at least one friend in a band that is not going to be heading Glastonbury any time soon and not just due to the festival's former policy of giving the fields a break every five years. Namely this band are rubbish, but what is to be done when your friend demands an on the spot review?

Over the weekend I attended a stand up night in Brighton. The city this took place in is important, because you would think simply being in 2012 would be enough to choose not to do homophobic material, but no.

One man got up on stage and noted his tight t-shirt might get him in trouble tonight (again with the confusion over what consent is), another told an offensive joke concerning razor blades and gay men's sex lives. A domestic violence joke had to be done because the comic had dropped his rape jokes: “people don't like those any more.” What does this discerning guy do as a day job? Policeman. Not for the first time, in an unfortunately silent bar, I turned to my friend and commented: “Well I could do that.”

Amateur stand up might not be my calling or my great talent but I am fond of thinking I could last 5 minutes on stage without offending the audience. What was interesting was the creeping suspicion these men weren't particularly funny at any time, whether on stage or with their friends. They only thing that was laughable was the insistence on their part that they had girlfriends. 

Todd Akin has raised eyebrows after sharing his Science of Conception. We knew that the female body was a wonderful, ingenious thing, with its self cleansing vagina, ability to produce breast milk and grow another human being within itself. Trigger warning. But it turns out it has 'ways' of preventing conception in the event of 'legitimate rape'. Biology just got a conscience.

In an interview on Fox's Jaco Report concerning abortion rights and the Morning After pill, Akin aired his views on abortion in the case of rape. Turns out Akin heard from someone's cousin's friend who knows a doctor who told them how the female body works. “It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. Let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something. You know, I think there should be some punishment. But the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.”

It happens to us all, death and taxes are, notoriously, the only certainties in life and getting older is perhaps the preferable alternative. Here at Squeamish Bikini we can't be sure of what your measure of young/old is but I think it's fair to say we are fast approaching summer chicken status.

The abrupt halt in fashion of originality and fondness instead for revivals is cruel to those forced to witness their childhood threads laughed at, then worn by those born in a later decade. The worship of youth has increased and the hunt to cling on to it by hook or by Botox as soon as the first grey hair crests the scalp is emptying our ageing pockets.

New attitudes to marriage and economic difficulties have meant that the old joke of 40 being the new 30 and so on is coming true. 20-somethings are living like teens and 30-somethings are hitting milestones formerly the territory of people 10 years their junior.

So when do we get to be crotchety and disapproving now the decades are swapping around and Olay is using SCIENCE like never before? We have decided there's no time like the present and here are the things that make us feel OLD...