There was definitely no need for coats and scarves this evening. It seemed that spring had decisively handed off the baton early to summer and the new season was away and running. The evening was warm and the breeze soft as Amy and I, now having inelegantly climbed onto our respective loungers, sat back and sighed happily.

‘Thanks for all this, Libs.’

‘You’re very welcome,’ I replied. Forgetting my worries for a while, and with a smile on my face, I closed my eyes, soaking up the atmosphere as the gentle warmth of the setting sun caressed our skin.

Closing the Twitter app, I leaned over, grabbed my handbag and proceeded to tip the contents out onto my desk. Tilly, my part-time assistant, looked up from where she’d been leafing through the latest issue of Vogue that had dropped through the door this morning. She raised an eyebrow in question.

‘Apparently it’s national “What’s in your handbag?” day. I thought we could join in,’ I replied, poking the pile of stuff now in front of me.

‘We?’

‘Yes.’ I paused, looking over at her. ‘Why not? You haven’t got a loaded weapon in there, have you? Or half a kilo of cocaine?’

‘No! Of course not!’

‘I’m joking, Tils. You just looked decidedly shifty when I mentioned it. It’s fine if you don’t want to do it, anyway. It’s not compulsory.’ I grinned, before turning my attention back to the contents of my bag. A tampon sat proudly in the middle of the pile. I chewed my lip for a moment, and then snagged the item out and put it to the side.

I noticed Tilly watching me.

‘So, we can edit what’s in there?’ she asked.

I raised a brow. ‘I don’t think the world needs to see my emergency sanitary items. There’s sharing and there’s over-sharing.’

Tilly waited a beat before grabbing her own bag and turning it upside down on her own desk.

‘Holy crap, Tils!’ I laughed. ‘How do you even carry all that without tipping over?’

‘I keep meaning to clear it out and never seem to get around to it.’

‘Apparently. Well, why don’t you take this as an opportunity? Sort out what you want in there and then we can just post the “after” rather than the “before”.’

Tilly pulled a face. ‘I’m not sure you should be paying me for sorting out my handbag.’

I waved her protest away.

A grin slipped onto Tilly’s face. ‘OK.’

For the next twenty minutes, there were several exclamations of the ‘Bloody hell, I’ve been looking for that forever’ and ‘Oh, I wondered where that had gone!’ variety. By the time she had finished, Tilly’s bag was about half a tonne lighter and the nearby waste-paper basket was overflowing. Artfully arranging each pile to look specifically unartfully arranged, but in a pleasing manner, we moved the lights over to the desk and photographed each one – the contents in sharp focus with the handbags themselves slightly out of focus in the background. Tilly emailed me her copy for the post, listing the items her bag now contained and their significance, if any, which I then added to my own piece, before quickly typing an introduction about the hashtag. Finally, I copied and pasted a bunch of hashtags we commonly used for blog posts, and added the #whatsinmyhandbag tag to the bottom. With the photos loaded, I ran the spellchecker then gave the text a final scan as a triple check. Satisfied that there were no errors, I pressed submit and the post went live on my Brighton Belle lifestyle blog.