Dinner, bath, book, bedtime: every school year we stick to the timetable for a few days. Until the variables start creeping in …

There is a protocol at New York City public schools that allows for early entrance in the morning if you sign your kids up for breakfast. Customarily, the school gates open at 8.30am (and shut, as we know too well, at 8.33am, after which you are marked late and forced to shout at your children in the street). But if you arrive 30 minutes early, you can get them up the steps and into the building for a Department of Education-issued muffin and milk and be back at your desk by 8.30am. This is the holy grail in our house, a piece of flawless efficiency that sets the stage for the rest of the day. In three years of school, we have achieved it twice.

The quest for the perfect timetable is one I’ve been periodically engaged in since high school. Then, it was a matter of coloured pens and folders. If I could find the right combination of highlighters, stickers and capitalised sub-heads, I could pass into the golden zone of faultless revision notes, gateway to the state of nirvana. This ambition faded in my 20s and for some of my 30s, when life was single-focus enough to make timetabling simple. Now, in my 40s and with two kids and their interests to manage, the desire to nail a frictionless existence has come roaring back. It is particularly strong at this time of year, when the back-to-school vibes are strong. This year we’ll do it, I think. We’ll parcel out our time into 20-minute segments, and before we know it we’ll be robot-efficient.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

Encased in chocolate, blended into martinis, baked in a croissant – tasty, maybe, but let’s not kid ourselves about the health benefits

On my desk as I write this I have a packet of shelled, unsalted pistachios, a snack about which I have no particular feelings beyond the fact they’re better for me than Hula Hoops and, like so many things I’ve been persuaded to buy by my doctor, can be integrated into a “heart healthy diet”. Pistachios are also, it turns out, having a moment. We’ve been here before, with pomegranates and acai and, a few years ago, bone broth and anchovies. Now it’s the turn of the upmarket green peanut (oh look, I do have an opinion), which, once you start noticing it, you’ll find appears to be everywhere.

It started last year with the rise of what is informally known as Dubai chocolate, the so-called confectionery invented by the British-Egyptian entrepreneur Sarah Hamouda, that took over the world – and that became, according to Deliveroo, one of last year’s top items ordered worldwide. If you haven’t encountered it, the Can’t Get Knafeh Of It chocolate bar is a fancy slab of milk chocolate stuffed with a mixture of shredded filo, date syrup and pistachio cream, which tastes like a blocked artery and looks like wet tobacco. The original bar – the market is teeming with knock-offs – costs about £15.99, and if you can finish it in one sitting I raise my cholesterol to you.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist