Greetings! I am back – from another land called maternity leave. It’s been nearly a year since I last wrote on these pages. I signed off this lovely column telling you of a letter I had written to myself before heading off, I hoped, with our baby to traverse a sleepless place filled with hot tears and kisses.

Thankfully, she came and our leg-thumping, beaming daughter has been keeping our beat ever since. And that insurance letter to remind me how to do my job and life before her arrival? Opened and consumed. I’ve been back at my day job on the radio just shy of two months now.

I am still finding my balance. There is a lot going on personally and politically (putting it mildly). But of all the things to talk about in my first column back with you, I choose joy.

Joy doesn’t always choose us. Nor is it always possible. Far from it. Let’s take that as a given.

But I am finding the flashes of it – the unexpected giggles and the things that give it to you – more and more vital.

As ever in my life, when in doubt, I find myself reaching for the words and wisdom of a powerful, talented and older woman. In this case, let us turn to Barbra Streisand, one of the three women we listened to on loop in my mum’s car throughout my childhood. (She was in great company in the cassette tape pile, with Diana Ross and Tina Turner.)

Last week, in a rare interview to mark the publishing of her memoir, our original Funny Girl made a........

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