I offered my six-year-old a choice between half an hour of telly and half an hour of being read to the other day. “Can I have a bit of both?” he said. “I like things to be medium.”

‘God, mate,’ I thought. ‘So do I. So do I.’

I am utterly exhausted, nearly broken, by the age of extremes in which we now seem to live. Everything must be not just black and white, but the very blackest black, the very whitest white. It must be all or it must be nothing.

We must have not just Brexit – quite an extreme thing in the first place, the decision to leave the European Union – but hard Brexit. We must not have healthy eating but ‘clean’ eating, when whole food groups are rejected and the others must be forced into narrower and narrower forms of acceptability; raw, organic, juiced, shredded, spiralised, only eaten in conjunction with certain seeds, or standing barefoot in a natural rock pool under a hunter’s moon. We mustn’t just have controversial columnists, we must have people who actively seek to inflame, demoralise and harm. Every misstep or unfortunate facial expression by a politician or celebrity must damn them, their work and everything associated with them for all time. And of course it seems like almost every day there are more people using extreme interpretations of religion to carry out acts of extreme violence.

Why? Why must we always be polarised – or polarise ourselves – in this way? Beyond perhaps some short-term and briefly lucrative notoriety for the columnists, it does no-one any good.

Lucy Mangan is exhausted by the “age of extremes”