When Maria finds herself apologising to food, it sparks a few questions…

Why do we say sorry so much? How do our past experiences of apologising shape why we say sorry?

And why, oh why, did she apologise for her boobs and a work colleague’s punctured testicle?

Lists, lists and more lists. Apple watch notifications.

And the world’s most annoying app.

The constant stream of tiny things to do, questions to answer and general background noise can be a f*cking nightmare…

Send help!

(Here’s a link to a bunch of suggestions on how to handle ‘overwhelm’:https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jan/01/make-a-much-shorter-to-do-list-15-quick-simple-ways-to-avoid-overwhelm

Please Note: I haven’t tried any of these….yet)

It might be a New Year thing or an age thing, but quitting things is definitely a topic of discussion at the moment.

Maria looks at how you know when it’s time to quit something and how it’s better to reframe the decision for the positive.

Maria has unlocked a new level of parenting – guiding your children through their first broken hearts.

Listen as Maria examines her own break up CV (she has plenty of experience) and provides her guide as to how she sees the new rules for today’s dating game.

Good luck kids! This game is getting more complicated every day...

Not every Christmas is a merry one, but happy endings are sometimes achievable. The trouble with bad memories is they keep floating out of the woodwork like festive ghouls intent on ruining your happy vibes.

Maria shares how her first 14 Christmases were pretty cruddy and how their lingering presence needs to be put to rest once and for all.

Contains a theme of domestic abuse, just so you know. Nothing graphic though.

For help with domestic abuse, please visit https://www.gov.uk/guidance/domestic-abuse-how-to-get-help for a list of services available.

If you listened to Episode 3 then you’ll want to hear this one :)

Listen in to find out the names of all the 90s bands included in Episode 3! Maria will guide you through each one. How many did you get?

When a man ‘of a certain age’ dismisses the concerns and accusations of women ‘of a certain age’, it shows he doesn’t have a clue about the lived experience of women.

This episode contains some details of Maria’s own potted history of sexual violence and harassment and why women of a certain age are just fed up now…

How, after almost 30 years of consigning university to a bin labelled failure, reliving shared experiences with old friends helped Maria salvage a part of herself she had forgotten. There was physics, biology and a bit of chemistry.

You can’t rewrite the past, but you can reframe it.

27 years after graduating it’s finally time to attend a reunion of sorts. But after almost 3 decades, Maria can finally admit that university didn’t turn out the way she’d hoped at 18 and that she probably shouldn’t have gone in the first place…

And also, what does she wear?

Everyone’s got one.

Some folks are so desperate to share their opinion (not their, well, you know what) that they won’t wait to be asked.

But not all opinions are created equal and the trick to getting value from someone else’s thoughts is to work out what you need and who you need it from…

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/10/the-best-advice-ive-ever-been-given-celebrities-share-their-wisdom