It’s not easy being an optimist these days. It requires practice, like exercising a muscle. It’s why I like to think of reading the news as a kind of challenge, batting away the miserable updates with optimistic mental rebuttals. Global heating on track to exceed the 2C threshold? “But we have the technology to turn this around!” I think. A well-funded global fascist network? “People have overcome worse!”

And so it is that this week I find my optimism being put through its paces by the news of US superstar homemaker Martha Stewart and her offensive Halloween costume of a homeless person, complete with a dirt-smeared face and a sign reading “I AM HUNGRY HELP ME!!”.

How’s this for a more upbeat interpretation: she is preparing for her next chapter as an edgy, anti-humour one-woman act known as Martha Stewart Lee. I can see it now: her Fringe show – which I am calling Laundered – receiving rave reviews. “After decades of perfect tablescapes, Martha Stewart serves up something truly unpalatable: herself.” Five stars!

Before influencers made “being a Pinterest board made flesh” a viable career, there was Stewart. Arguably the US’s national authority on doing domestic things properly, Stewart, now 85, built an empire of cookbooks, magazines, TV shows and homeware. In........

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