Watching the Bezos rocket launch, I let out a yelp. You’re kidding me? This has to be a skit, a Mike Myers satire on shameless gazillionaires. I wasn’t thinking of the space shuttle’s passenger list of rich, ludicrous women like Katy Perry but the shape of the vessel itself.

The New Shepard rocket was — how do I put this? — the most penisy thing ever constructed that wasn’t an actual sex aid. You don’t need to be a Freudian or possess a filthy mind to look at the ahem, shaft, and the, um, tip, and wonder what influence Jeff had in its design. I mean, the hands holding the swords of Qadisiyah in Baghdad’s Victory Arch were cast from Saddam Hussein’s own fingers …

I looked up the Apollo rockets of my childhood: long, slender and pointy, like missiles, hypodermic needles or pens. Far more decorous than this stumpy yet intrepid metal phallus briefly penetrating the heavens, a billionaire’s version of every schoolboy’s favourite graffiti, a tech bro cock and balls.

Reading that two in three young women won’t take their husbands’ names, it struck me that views on this go in phases. In the 1980s, when a married couple were commonly listed as “Mr and Mrs Joseph Bloggs”, as if the wife herself had no identity, it was a mark of feminist defiance to keep your own name.

Then in the mid-1990s, the age of Loaded and “ladettes”, women reverted to tradition: feminism’s job was seen as pretty much done, so taking your boyfriend’s name was merely cute — whereas keeping your own marked you out as a humourless, hairy-armpitted Viz magazine Millie Tant.

I remember this well, because I married in 1995 and didn’t change my name. If I’m honest, this was more about laziness than principle. I have no patience with admin, and sending off forms to passport offices, telling your bank and informing your colleagues seemed a mighty faff just to erase your former self.

But such indolence came back to bite me years later when my parents — the only people who ever wrote to me as “Mrs” — listed me in their wills and lasting powers of attorney by my unregistered married name, thus casting me deep into bureaucratic hell.

Don’t change your names, girls, and don’t let anyone else do it for you.

The crabapple tree is in flower right now, the whiteness of the blossom so intense it changes the light in my bedroom. You don’t understand why April is the cruellest month until middle age, when you wish you could capture for ever this fleetingly gorgeous explosion of life. Even a decade ago, I’d have barely noticed the crabapple.

So would I prefer to live in a climate of perpetual spring? At altitude on the equator, Cuenca in Ecuador was a steady 16C to 20C: no heating or air-conditioning required; no winter coats ever, only a light jacket; sunny but always a chance of rain; never too hot; daylight until 6pm. Every single day, all year round.

Tempting but monotonous. I guess I’m too British, too tethered to the seasons. I hate our bone-chilling, dark-at-4pm winters but they have to be endured. To be properly appreciated, spring has to be earned.

As you pass through any major London station now, a voice intones: “Beware of pickpockets and gadget grabbers.” I’d never heard the latter before. I bet some bright spark in the Met’s PR team is pleased with the twee alliteration. Gadget grabbers sound like those fairground machines where you have to manoeuvre a mechanical claw to win a toy.

But this new coinage indicates that the London phone-snatching epidemic is getting worse. I’ve seen thieves whip them out of people’s hands in the street and outside Tube stations. Now we’re alert to that, they’re targeting people scrolling in carriages, timing the theft to jump out just as the doors close.