The 'overwhelm' - noun, not verb - has been around 'since at least 1596', AL Kennedy discovers.

She looks at the reasons why the word is making a comeback - and she has some advice for those who also feel lost in 'the overwhelm.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong

Remember the days, Howard Jacobson implores us, when we got on fine with 'very'?

Today, Howard argues, 'very’ is not ‘very’ enough for the times we live in.' In its place, 'incredible' and other supersized words, spreading 'verbal chaos.'

Howard reflects on the dangers of over-inflated language, 'where words prance about without their clothes, shouting obscenities.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong

As Donald Trump prepares to re-enter the White House, Mark Damazer reflects on America's leadership in the world.

Eavesdropping on a focus group recently, Mark tells us that the country's leadership was seen as 'a burden and a luxury - and a luxury they wanted to do without.'

'There was a time when large chunks of the world were grateful for American involvement...but gratitude is now more thinly expressed', he says. 'And Donald Trump well understands that.'

In this new world order, Mark argues, 'we have our work cut out to find a response.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong

In deepest, darkest January, Adam Gopnik muses on light and dark.

Adam reminds us that - from the natural world of the ghost moth to the politics of today's America - although we live in a 'gloomy moment' we can 'adjust our eyes to the gloom.'

'Every little bit of light we make,' writes Adam, 'in every decent thing we do and every indecency we refuse to accept, illuminates some small corner of our universe. Even at night, after all, we still see light. The stars shine, too.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong

Sara Wheeler explains why every week for several decades - despite knowing nothing about art - she has called in to London’s National Gallery to look at the same two paintings.

'This habit of mine,' writes Sara, 'started by accident when I moved to London forty years ago' when she first set eyes on Botticelli's 'Portrait of a Young Man' and van Eyck's 'Portrait of a Man.'

'I have come to realise,' says Sara, the extraordinary power of 'familiarity, close contact and regular attention'.

Producer: Adele Armstrong

Megan Nolan rediscovers a childhood diary with her first New Year's Resolutions.

She was fascinated and appalled, she says, by what she read:. The final resolution, underlined, read simply 'be a better person!'

These days, Megan looks on self-improvement in a rather different way - less an attempt at perfection and more 'an attempt to courageously embrace living in all its chaos.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong

Mary Beards reflects on what really lies behind our attachment to Christmas ritual and tradition.

In a special edition of A Point of View, recorded in Mary's kitchen as she prepares her Christmas puddings, she ponders 'why those of us who aren't particularly wedded to the idea of tradition for the rest of the year, fall hook, line and sinker for it at this time.'

'My hunch,' Mary says, 'is that our fixed traditions are about constructing a family identity for ourselves, about displaying to ourselves as a family - changing, expanding and contracting as families always are - what makes us 'us.''

Producer: Adele Armstrong

Reading of Dickens/Herodotus: Simon Slater

ARCHIVE

1. Extracts of Keith Floyd from A Farewell to Floyd, produced by Cactus TV.

With water companies reeling from criticism over sewage discharge and rising bills, Stephen Smith squelches through London's watery underworld.

'Descending into London's Victorian sewers', Stephen says, 'is like spelunking through the layers of the city's history, and reminds you that problems over water and sanitation have been the norm rather than an aberration' for centuries.

Producer: Adele Armstrong

Zoe Strimpel on the joys of seeing the world through the eyes of her 9 month old daughter.

'Where previously I would barely have noticed them,' Zoe writes, 'I now size up trees from below in terms of buds, leaves, colour, height - and how all of these may look to my little lady viewed from her pram or carrier in which her neck swivels constantly like a periscope, or an owl.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong

Rebecca Stott ponders the task of clearing her Mum's house, and the enormous difficulty of dismantling the things her mother loved and that Rebecca remembers her buying from bric-a-brac and antique shops.

'The beauty of the objects in my mother's house exists in her artistry,' writes Rebecca, 'the way she had placed some of them so that the evening light falls on them, the way that the kooky little Italian lamp sits next to the framed print of the Venetian canal... the way that everything is in the place that she had chosen for it.'

It gets her wondering about how many other people are doing the same with their parents' homes, in towns and cities across the country.

Producer: Adele Armstrong