As it sped off, I was euphoric. I had fashioned a complex sentence and hit a nerve with my pointed words. Or had I?

My friends looked on with dismay as my eyes turned to cartoon love hearts

Getting dumped right before a solo overland journey from Barcelona to Beijing derailed my bid to rebrand myself as a woman of the world

I was naive and underprepared when I agreed to go backpacking around South America with my boyfriend

It was almost empty, from another era and didn’t even take us to where we were going

Getting my husband and children to the beachside getaway with my parents was traumatic enough, but then it got worse

When Brie Veron and her friends book a ‘two-hour’ trip into Costa Rica, they aren’t expecting a 16-hour ordeal involving a shady cabbie and a dodgy curry

I followed Malcolm Turnbull to Hamburg, tried to pap Vladimir Putin and was told I may have gonorrhoea of the eyeballs

I never know what to buy my wife for her birthday, but the year I gave her a week on Hamilton Island will be hard to top

As each pair of my undies was unpacked and swabbed for narcotics, I tried to explain that my hoarder’s collection of memorabilia was all Covid’s fault

Unable to drink and hazy with painkillers, my six visits to the dentist started in a deserted Moscow mall and ended in Berlin, via diarrhoea in Barcelona

A man wearing budgie smugglers finally got the tyre loose, made an offensive remark we couldn’t understand and drove off