I GOT an invitation this week which I found very hard to turn down (sarcasm alert).

A firm in Sheffield that brings women together asked me to be a guest panellist at an International Women’s Day event in March.

An evening meant to inspire and value women.

Except there wasn’t much valuing going on seeing as there was a big underlined message at the bottom of the email informing me that they aren’t in a position to offer a fee to their speakers.

BUT you do get a lot of exposure on their Instagram channel (5k followers – I’ve got 10.6k). And – get this – I wouldn’t have to pay to attend because I’d get a free ticket!

And more incentives: if I wanted to take a mate along, I could buy a ticket for them at a discounted price.

Blimey, how could I refuse. But, funnily enough, I did. It would cost me to do them a favour because no one was paying for my petrol either.

I wonder if they see the irony in me valuing myself enough to not turn up. Maybe not as they seem pretty thick-skinned. But I am going to ring a plumber later to ask if he’ll come and look at the leak under the sink and I’m not in a position to pay him but I’ll give him some advertising on Instagram.

I wonder how many Fs would be in his reply.

I also wonder if the event organisers are paying for their space, paying themselves for their time, paying for the tickets to be printed and the media person, but weirdly not the speakers who would be their main draw.

So sorry, I won’t be giving an insight of how ‘my pleasures can impact my whole life’. But it has been a total pleasure to get my PR lot to tell you to do one.

In answer to Keith Howe of Mapplewell’s letter last week about ‘collective selective memory loss’ in which he describes such an affliction as forgetting the past 14 years and blaming everything that has gone wrong in this country on the past six months.

Yep, the Tories made a total cock of the country. BUT I also think that Labour have been smitten with the same disease.

How else can you explain all the scoffing they did scaremongering that the Tories were going to get rid of the winter fuel allowance, that they would scrap the two-child limit, that they would help the WASPI women, protect the farmers… Maybe it’s a political thing. Pin your colours to any mast and you are immediately smitten with a Harry Potter ‘obliviate’ spell.

The Barnsley Lit festival is back again for a second year and I’m totally and utterly delighted that it is because it’s my book launch on February 27 and I’ve managed to tag onto it via the back door.

I always have my launches in town because they feel like a christening party. I’ll be having a ‘do’ on the actual launch day in Barnsley Library.

It never gets any less exciting for me. There’s a link on the ‘appearances’ page on my website (millyjohnson.co.uk) to book tickets. Do come and join me and partake in a cuppa and some jollity.

Why is it that the sacred ‘Christmas cupboard’ still has food in it?

Food that I bought and no one was allowed to touch until Christmas, even if we were all desperate to get our hands on it. It’s still there untouched and no one wants it. The New Year has a terrible magic to remove the craving for those little biscuits shaped like Christmas trees, the bottle of advocaat, After Eights…