I don’t like this expression “First World problems.” It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here’s a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.

However, girls don’t just have sex because they view themselves as “sex objects”: teenage and even pre-teenage girls have sexual desires of their own. Sex isn’t necessarily something that is done to girls, because they view themselves as sexual objects; it can be initiated and enjoyed by them. Indeed, the reason underage sex among girls is rising could be due to female sexuality becoming less taboo.

I agree with Abbott that we need “better PSHE [personal, social, health and economic] teaching in schools for both girls and boys”. Sex education should focus not just on the mechanics of heterosexual sex and how to keep it safe – important as these are – but on varieties of sex. Sex between girls, sex between boys; the importance of enthusiastic consent – in effect, discussion of how to have good sex rather than just safe sex.

It’s tough to associate creativity with mental illness because obviously if you’re very ill, it gets in the way. … But one of the theories now is that the terrible swings of the mental illness – of bipolar depression – you get these manic highs, these euphorias, where the ideas just pour out of you. And you need to write them down. That’s followed by this dismal low period when maybe you’re a better editor. Maybe it’s easier for you to focus and refine those epiphanies into a perfect form. … The thinking is maybe the correlation exists because the swings of mental illness echo the natural swings of the creative process.