I feel happy today,” my daughter announces as we walk to her nursery. “That’s lovely to hear,” I tell her. “What’s made you happy?” She thinks about it. “I don’t know,” she says, after a few minutes of reflection. “This morning, when I opened-ed my eyes, I smiled and I was just happy.” “That’s so nice,” I say. “Hearing that makes me happy. You’ve made me happy.” “I know,” she says. I look at the baby, who is listening intently to our conversation, not that she possesses enough vocabulary to reply. It doesn’t matter. She is always listening. She understands a lot. “Are you happy?” I ask the baby. She smiles and she nods slowly three times.

I haven’t been happy recently. It’s been largely a feeling of being overworked and moving from project to project without ever getting the opportunity to reflect on a piece of work and enjoy the satisfaction of completing it. Then there’s the correspondence about the project. If you write and put stuff into the public sphere, people have a space within which to give you feedback. In the form of social media posts, comments and emails. Which is their right. But every now and then, a piece of “feedback” will undo you.

I received an email, after a comment of mine, where the person wrote: “I don’t want to be unwelcoming or unfriendly…” before laying out, in the politest way possible, their case for why eugenics is real and therefore racism can be justified because I don’t belong in this country and I should just go home. It’s the polite tone, the reasonableness with which the email is executed that completely undid me.

“It’s just an idiot off the internet,” a friend says. “Best ignore it.” But it’s hard to ignore. You think you can. In a world where there is 24-hour access to you, to tell you what someone thinks of your work, you find the feedback creeps into your mind at random times.

People are shouting at you for not being very good and then shouting for not having the thick skin to take criticism

I remember receiving an angry email from someone about something I’d written on my way to a venue. I was lost and searching through the inbox on my phone for the arrangements. An email came through and a loose thumb selected it. I read it. Then 10 minutes later, I was on stage doing a talk about my work, having just read something that laid out why that work was terrible.

The random idiots off the internet accumulate and take up residence in your head. People are basically shouting at you for not being very good and then shouting at you for not having the necessary thick skin to take criticism. It makes it hard to step away and get some perspective. So that polite eugenicist took up real estate in my head, gnawing away, and God I was unhappy.

I recently turned my smartphone into just a phone. I took all the email and social media off it. And that has, weirdly, made me happier. Having the power to pick and choose when you interact with people is empowering. Also, emerging from an intense period of delivering two books this year means that as the workload lessens, maybe there will be more time to just exist.

As we walk up the road, we play the game we play most mornings: the first person to spot the purple car wins. I let my daughter win. The baby, desperate to be let off the leash, dives out of my hands in an effort to walk alongside her sister. I put her on the ground. She holds each of our hands and we pull her along. We stop to pick flowers for two of my daughter’s favourite staff members at the nursery. She jumps up on to a wall and runs along it, jumping down on the other side. The baby squeals. We arrive at nursery and just before I ring the doorbell, I look at my eldest and say: “I’m happy too.”

“Good,” she replies, offering me a high-five. We go inside and someone asks me to check a date on my calendar. I go to get my phone out and realise I’ve left it at home. “I’ll check later,” I tell her.

I leave for home and walk down the road, away from nursery, and I smile. I do feel happy today.