This is a historic moment.* I have just checked my bank balance and realised that this month, for the first time in about two years, I will not veer dangerously close to going overdrawn. I achieved this feat by writing down my monthly income and outgoings, subtracting the one from the other and working out how much I could sensibly spend each week, and then doing it. I know! Rocket science.

In celebration of the fact that it’s taken me two years of nearly (and sometimes actually) going overdrawn every four weeks to work out how to stay in the black, here are some more things that it took me ages to figure out:

Just because someone disagrees with me, it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. I still have trouble with this one, even though I know it’s objectively true. But when I remember to act like it’s true, I get into less trouble.

It’s fine to bring two pieces of hand luggage. Those warnings about having to pay extra if you carry an extra bag are LIES. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve squeezed everything I needed for a trip overseas into one bag, only to arrive at an airport and find everyone else has merrily brought a handbag, a rucksack, a shopping bag and a laptop case and nobody minds a bit. IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP (thanks Egon): this doesn’t hold true for Ryanair, where you can’t even carry a bottle of water outside your one weeny bag without being told off and charged an extra hundred and twenty thousand pounds.

I am the only person who notices if my nose is shiny. Amazing, but true. I look in the mirror and see the swamp thing, everybody else sees the same person they see when my nose isn’t shiny. I can’t decide if this is good news because I must always look like the person I see in the mirror on a non-shiny day, or bad news because I must always look like the person I see in the mirror on a shiny day. Thoughts welcome, even though I now know nobody cares but me.

You can clean everything with baby wipes. I used to think you needed a different type of cleaning product for every surface in the home. This always felt like too much effort, so I combated the problem by only cleaning things made of glass (because cleaning mirrors is fun). Then one day I used a baby wipe instead of a piece of kitchen towel to mop up a spill, and noticed that the bit of kitchen I’d mopped up was cleaner than all the rest of the kitchen, so I carried on mopping until my kitchen was sparklingly clean, and I’ve never looked back. Just, don’t get the ones that smell of nappies.

Frank Lampard and Jamie Redknapp are cousins. I found this out a year ago and told everyone I knew, and they all shrugged and went “yeah, everyone knows that”.

The Kylie Minogue who played Charlene in Neighbours is the same Kylie Minogue who sang I Should Be So Lucky. Yeah, I know. In my defence I was eleven, but for a good six months I was absolutely convinced they were different people. I even knew what they both looked like.

* Not really, but I can almost never resist quoting Clockwise, even when I should absolutely know better.

…all right, not to me, but to Glad All Over, which has reached the stately age of four today. My birthday, in case you were wondering, is in August, and I like jewels, boots, detective stories, flowers and kitchen implements. If you can’t wait till August, I believe it’s nearly Valentine’s Day.

Glad All Over sort of started off as a blog about football, but now it’s more or less a blog about nothing, or if you prefer, a blog about everything (except theatre, because I write about that elsewhere, occasionally). I try to write impassioned, well-argued pieces on language and design and travel and food and music, but the posts which get the highest traffic are invariably about baby baboons or a swimming pool I’ve never been to. I’m not sure how I should feel about the fact that, in general, the fewer words a post has, the more views it gets. Perhaps I am more of a visual person.

As it happens, 2011 saw Glad All Over’s highest ever traffic, and 2012 has gotten off to a belter of a start, so thank you ever so much for reading, and if there’s anything in particular you would like me to write about, do please let me know. I will write about everything except for rugby, about which the only thing I can tell you is that it’s a highly technical game played by warriors (© the beloved).

I spent yesterday in a pleasant bank holiday haze, watching tennis and old films and eating scrambled eggs on toast. I was so relaxed that unless you’d been looking closely you might not have known I was awake. “This is how bank holidays should be”, I thought, as I briefly emerged from a doze between sets. “I’ll sleep well tonight.”

So naturally I woke up at 4am in a full-body clench of insomnia and anxiety that came from nowhere and has now dissipated, its only after-effects being a darkening of the circles under the eyes that arrived sometime after university and will never leave. I like to think they add character.

But tired eyes give me an excuse to wear dark glasses when it’s not very sunny, and wearing dark glasses when it’s not very sunny is something I love doing. When I am old I will wear them all the time, even indoors. I don’t remember much about my maternal grandfather but I remember that he wore dark glasses all the time, even indoors, and that it made him look kind of cool and a bit forbidding at the same time. Since that’s a look I aspire to anyway, it all falls into place perfectly.

The other upside to insomnia is that 4am is actually quite a lovely time to be awake at this time of year. The birds were singing and there was no traffic or shouting or loud music to drown them out. The only other sound was the periodic honking of someone’s car alarm, but even that came with a silver lining because it woke up the beloved, and if there’s one thing you want when you’re lying awake in a full-body clench of insomnia and anxiety, it’s company.