All the single ladies, all the single ladies, all the single ladies, now put your hands up! Because you ruin absolutely everything and deserve to be called out. Endlessly, and around the world. The latest example is Kanji Kato, a Japanese MP who has called single women a “burden on the state”. Annoyingly, there is a grain of truth in this, if the single women are childless, as ageing populations put pressure on national health services, including our own NHS.

In the past, globally, when people tended to have more children, those children cared for their parents and other older relatives. But in many countries that trend is declining, requiring medical professionals, nurses and retirement homes to bridge the care gap. But it never seems to be the case that politicians pipe up about single, childless men, who also grow old and need care, and who, in their youth, are deified as ambitious or approved of as charming, roguish scamps. It’s women who, in the words of another Japanese politician, are the “birth-giving machines”, and any who choose not to have children, or who can’t, are deemed to be malfunctioning.

But hey, single women have become used to this attitude, alongside the millennial generation, who are also responsible for everything bad or depressing. Single women are making everyone feel awkward (particularly the entire global tabloid press if that woman is Jennifer Aniston). Their need for babies is forcing the rest of us to pay for them with our taxes and provide IVF on the NHS (a move that “casts doubt on the government’s family-friendly credentials”, according to the Telegraph). Apparently, single women are also responsible for men who go on murdering sprees because they had the indecency to reject them.

It’s amazing that single women have the audacity to roam about in daylight, as if they were, in fact, not single and therefore normal. A favourite series of articles of mine on this subject are titled along the lines of: Avoid the Mistakes Single Women Make, which include (really) “being shortsighted about life”, “falling down on the job of life” and “giving up and caving in” .

It’s not really a new thing, viewing single women as freaks. Remember that Bridget Jones quote, when she is asked why so many women in their 30s are single? “I don’t know. I suppose it doesn’t help that underneath our clothes, our entire bodies are covered in scales.”

Single women deserve a break. Especially because it’s actually society that is ruining everything for single women. There is the extortionate cost of renting alone, or forking out double the cost when you holiday solo, then having to watch couples coo at origami swan napkins while they demand you take photos of them. There is trying to pretend that other people’s babies don’t all look the same. Or, for single women who have children, having to deal with society’s raised eyebrows.

A 2017 report found that single women were much happier than single men, mostly because they are not tied down with the emotional and domestic labour that comes with being a woman in a (heterosexual) relationship. It probably also has something to do with the fact that nobody can veto your Netflix choices if you’re the only one making them, and not being dragged along to a partner’s work do. Could these snide asides at single women just be the politics of envy?

Arctic Monkeys have turned into the old drunk in the corner

It’s extraordinary, really, what has happened to Arctic Monkeys. The band made their name thanks to their authenticity, and now a song on their new album, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, has Alex Turner playing an ageing rock star and singing “maybe I was a little too wild in the 70s” – despite being born in 1986.

Turner has told BBC’s Radio 1 that he feels embarrassed by his old lyrics, even though their second album beautifully summed up a dying relationship as, “Several hours or several weeks / I’d have the cheek to say they’re equally as bleak”; while the new record, five years in the making, includes: “I can get you on the list for all the clubs” and has a song called The Ultracheese.

It’s not that Arctic Monkeys are bad now – it’s just that they were so much fun then. It was exciting, for those of us who had the bootleg recordings from live gigs, to see their songs transform from the rough to the recorded version (often with name changes – When the Sun Goes Down was first named Scummy).

It’s part of the joy of being a music fan; watching acts (or their collaborators) evolve and innovate. And though I’m sure repeated listens of TBH&C may unearth melodies, somewhere, at the moment it feels like the audio equivalent of an enforced David Lynch marathon and Turner’s piano practice. I mean, Britney went from … Baby One More Time and pronouncing the word baby as “babe-un” and 12 years later gave us Toxic. Kanye’s debut single took a Chaka Khan vocal and made her sound like a chipmunk, but eventually gave us Power. Some acts evolve, others change their DNA. I’m mourning then, for a band that represented all the joy of that first Jägerbomb at a house party and now sound like the drunk old guy in the corner of a pub muttering under his breath.

Giggling as they choke

To Carpinteria, a town 85 miles from Los Angeles, which has begun to stink of weed more than a student with low-slung pants and a This Guitar Kills Fascists sticker. Californians voted in 2016 to legalise marijuana, which is great if you love a toke. But it would be awful for people like me who gag on pretty much all of London’s pot-filled streets – Carpinteria’s air essentially sounds like one big plume of dope smoke. Still, the UN found that 44 UK cities and towns are so polluted that they are dangerous to breathe in, dope or no dope. At least in Carpinteria, they’re probably giggling as they choke.