Sinead In The City: I'm almost 27 and I never want to leave my house again

I know you think everyone is out and about having fun without you, but I promise they're not. Photo / Getty Images

Sinead in the city

In two weeks I turn 27 and I've decided I'm not going to go outside anymore.

Not in a reclusive or agoraphobic way - like that poor lady in Nim's Island – just in a way where I've realised I am happiest in my lounge with a bottle of clean skin wine and a plate of cheese on top of my tray table breasts.

Because somewhere along the way I think we got confused, and I think Instagram is to blame.

Somewhere between the sad little boomerang videos of women cheers-ing their Aperol spritzes at bottomless brunch, the pastel-hued snaps of picnics in the park with the saturation cranked way up because this is Auckland and it's the middle of winter, and the Rowdy Group BYO Photos, we got confused. We thought everyone was out and about having fun without us, but I truly don't think they are.

Bottomless brunch is not fun. You spend $45 for unlimited alcohol and a rat-sized portion of cold eggs benedict. You are then sh*tfaced by midday and end up texting an ex asking what he's up2. What he's up2 is buying pots at Bunnings with his new girlfriend who has a thigh gap because she does reformer pilates and doesn't eat Uber Eats Nandos in bed.

Picnics in the park are not fun. You're always either too hot or too cold, the grass is itchy, the cold drinks go warm and the warm food goes cold. Plus, no one past the age of 25 can sit cross-legged comfortably without something twinging - and then you have to file a fake ACC claim to get the free physio and it's all a mare.

BYO dinners are not fun. You get stuck sitting next to a vague friend's colleague who you truly can't be effed making small talk with at the end of a long week. You drink an entire bottle of sour Countdown chardonnay and eat a trough of flavourless pad thai that tastes like that Maggi pouch pasta everyone's mum cooked in the 90s.

Then, despite ordering the cheapest pouch pasta on the menu, you end up having to pay $85 because some other drunk twit at your table trotted off to Longroom and skipped out on the bill. (Okay, that person is actually usually me, sorry to everyone who has ever BYO'd with me.)

I think we need to go back to basics and redefine what fun is:

Fun is a couch with back support. Fun is spending $12 on a bottle of wine, not a glass – and drinking it in the comfort of your own living room while watching Back With The Ex with your friends and revelling in the fact that - thank god - you are not Back With Your Ex.

I spent the entire first half of my twenties being coerced into nights out I didn't want to go on, just to wish I had stayed home wearing pants with an elastic waistband and watching Bridget Jones's Diary.

Because that's the thing, isn't it? Your top-tier friends, the ones whose names you write down on Important Forms as your emergency contacts, who love you at your sparkliest, still love you in your peri-peri sauce-stained dressing gown, too.

Don't worry, you're not going to see me on an episode of Hoarders, rocking back and forth in a dark room lined with towers of empty Big Mac cartons and sticky McFlurry pottles.

But while I'd absolutely love to spend time with you, I don't want to sit shivering at a rickety white-tableclothed table on Ponsonby Rd anymore, eating $18 chips. I'm old and cold.

Instead, I'd like to cordially invite you to spend the evening on my couch eating seven nubs of cheese and partaking in a Cobb & Co Traffic Light-inspired wine tasting - which is where I pour the dregs of every bottle of wine that's been rolling around in my fridge for the last month into one big glass.

Dress code: Elastic pants, bed socks and a pilled jumper.

And don't worry about a bra, you goose, underwire has no place in the comfort of one's home - and we love your real boobs just the way they are (which is nowhere near your chin, I'm sorry darling.)