Current mood: Adele and the joy of pottering

However much I fancy myself as a stellar karaoke performer, I wouldn’t have thought that multi-Grammy winning, multi-millionaire, Beverly Hills-dwelling, bona fide global superstar Adele and I have much in common. And, yet, when she appeared on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs this weekend, two things she said could have been plucked straight out of my mouth (no, not the bit about how surprised she was to win her first two Grammys. I wish).

‘I’m a sad person,’ she told Lauren Laverne, ‘And I don’t always know why’. I too am a sad person and I don’t always know why. That, however, is not necessarily a sad thing to admit (Adele has found power in her sadness; she translates it into her music). With age, I have just come to accept it as just part of the texture of who I am. If you are a person of a particularly sensitive demeanour, then you will find sadness everywhere. Even the hardest of people will admit that there are so many things to be sad about. But, if you are cast from the same melancholy mould as me and Adele, you will also find beauty and humanity where others don’t. Something else Adele revealed of her behind-closed-doors life: ‘I love pottering around and sorting out drawers’. That resonates with me as a fellow Sad Girl. Pottering is a salve for the gloomy. There is a blissful, mind-numbing calm to be found in menial tasks; there is something meditative about folding and filing and faffing around in cupboards (my appreciation does not extend to deep cleaning the oven, but that’s because I’m sad not mad). Doing nothing can often be as valuable as doing something. All those boring bits that would be edited out of the film of your life provide something very valuable: the illusion of control in an uncontrollable world.

So, when Adele was headlining at Hyde Park last Friday night in front of thousands of adoring fans and I was at home pottering in front of nobody (putting on a wash and watering my plants and Googling the calorific content of an entire packet of Digestive biscuits) maybe we weren’t from worlds that different after all.

Laura