Then, I moved from the Midlands to London and expected a surfeit of intersectional friends as a cosmic reward, like when Laura Linney moved to Barbary Lane in Tales of the City. Instead, I struggled to make friends in the megatropolis of faceless London, where it is illegal to look strangers in the eye. Today I got the train home from work, put my book and my phone down for 15 minutes and just watched and listened to the rain pattering on the window. I felt so calm. It was an utter joy.

That I felt that camera flash of pain in my gob that tells me I need to go to the dentist – so I went to the dentist. That I can afford to do so, without financial jiggery-pokery and stress.” Most of life is workaday, humdrum and pedestrian. So why not embrace the joy of the ordinary? We've got nothing to lose. So, what's the answer? THE UNEXPECTED JOY OF THE ORDINARY theorises that the solution is rediscovering the joy in the ordinary that we so often now forget to feel. Because we now expect the pleasure of a croissant, a hot shower, a yoga class, someone delivering our shopping to our door, we no longer feel its buzz. The joy of it whips through us like a bullet train, without pause. As a memoir this book really flops. Gray does not share memories of specific events that anchor her growth and story. I felt like the author keeps the reader at an arm’s length by mentioning “events” but never telling us what happened. It reminds me of a comic I saw the other day about a job interviewer asks the candidate to elaborate on being cryptic and mysterious, to which the candidate says, “I cannot, not since the incident.” (Nathan Wypyle – Strange Planet). I particularly liked the observation that the best way to cope with something non-horrific going badly wrong is to think how you'll tell it as a funny story afterwards. Again, this is because I 100% agree. Some of my favourite holiday memories with my husband are exactly this, things going ludicrously wrong, and the pair of us laughing till we cried. Do not ask me about the toilet incident in Mumbai station, or Escape from the Noto Peninsula.It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the self-help genre. I’ve read how to not give a f*** with Manson, understood the ways of a calm life with Fearne Cotton and even tried finding the clothes that spark joy with Marie. However, admittedly, nothing hit the mark as well as Catherine Gray’s The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary; a book that puts into practice the ways to find the pleasure in the ordinary and understand the psychology behind our need for the extraordinary— or just more. When I’d heard the news of his death, I had folded over and dropped my phone of the floor, as if right-hooked in the stomach by loss. I lay on the kitchen tiles, as expected, dominated by the overlord of bereavement.” Shallow, tone deaf, and self-indulgent. Incredibly boring and at times unintelligible. This book was a bad memoir and a worse self-help book. If you are coping with loss, depression, divorce, etc. I advise you to steer clear of this one. I can understand writing a book focused on providing solutions for, “first world problems”, but I cannot support work that is uninformed and dismissive of the reality of many. Say a relationship ends; now I know he’s a cheater. Or if a boring but reliable source of income vanishes; now I can pursue something that doesn’t turn my brain into a narcoleptic. Having to move house; a new town becomes my oyster.” I didn’t expect my quest for the ultimate extraordinary night out to birth an alcohol addiction. If I was bored, I didn’t go home. I drank more, in an attempt to salvage this faceplant of a night. Just one more drink, bar, dance. I didn’t expect to not be able to make a relationship last more than three years. My friends were getting engaged, starting families even, and had climbed on the property ladder thanks to parents handing them deposits, or the bittersweet windfall of inheritance, and in comparison, I felt like the very definition of a loser. On my 27th birthday, my mates made me a birthday book which they all wrote and drew in; all of the doodles of me starred wine and cigarettes. Later that night, I would chip my front tooth by drunkenly falling into a front door.

I reached a place in 2013 where the pain of my existence outweighed the fear of disappearing. I wanted to scratch myself out, as a person scratches off a golden panel on a scratchcard. What we love about Catherine’s book is that she helps us see through her own unique way that the solution to really discovering happiness is really in rediscovering that joy in the ordinary. Those things that we often forget are amazing because they’ve become so commonplace for us. Especially in a world of instant gratification. You spend the rest of the night focusing on your shortcomings. But what about all the good things your boss said? Well, you hardly give them a second thought.

Remember when you wanted what you have now

I’ve started a ‘gratitude diary.’ It’s lovely to appreciate the little things in life and I feel so much more at peace after writing in my diary.

Neuroscientist Dr. John Cacioppo carried out a study in which he showed his subjects different sets of images and measured how their brains responded. He found that people became more engaged when they looked at negative pictures, like guns and dead animals. Positive photos – things like pizza and ice-cream – didn’t create the same level of excitement.Six years ago I was suicidal. When I quit drinking I was still very low so I started researching how to change that. I kept coming up against gratitude and ‘finding beauty in the everyday’, and even though my Britishness was like, ‘that’s way too cheesy and twee for me’, I gave it a go. I joined a gratitude group on Facebook and started writing gratitudes every day and it completely turned my mental health around. Interesting and joyful. Lights a path that could help us to build resilience against society's urging to compare life milestones with peers - LANCET PSYCHIATRY Here are some real lines from real gratitude literature, plus how I felt when I read them. (Article origins and writers obviously concealed.)