HERE I am beginning to write my column a couple of days before publication and feeling a little out of sorts.

I wonder why I am in this humour and then have the answer as I glance in a national newspaper.

This reveals that Monday’s hold on the title is gone and now most people find Tuesday is the most miserable day of the week.

It may come as a surprise to Sir Bob Geldof who made his pop reputation singing I Don’t Like Mondays.

But researchers have come to the conclusion after studying the mood swings of 22,000 people who voluntarily registered their state of mind through an iPhone application called Mappiness.

Tuesday is reckoned to be the time when most people are at their lowest ebb for this reason: on Monday the weekend has not quite worn off but by Tuesday they are well into the working week and the following weekend is not yet in sight.

It’s simple really when you think about it. The solution, of course, is to make the weekend seven days long and scrap work but that would have an obvious economic consequence.

For the technophiles (I would not presume to describe myself as one), the way the study was conducted is of interest.

An alert was sent to volunteers’ iPhones twice a day and they were asked to respond by saying how they felt, who they were with (not sure if the results would be skewed if they happened to be talking to a funeral director at the time), whether they were at home and what they were doing.

Their exact location was also logged each time by satellite (GPS can be a wonderful thing) which, almost as an aside, enabled the researchers to pinpoint the happiest – and unhappiest – places in the country.

If you want to be least miserable on Tuesdays, spend them in Bournemouth where 82 per cent of residents who took part seemed to be quite content with life. Avoid the City of London, Eastbourne and Slough. Come to think of it, it’s probably best to avoid those places every day of the week.

Don’t say you heard it from me – I’ve just learned that the average UK woman can only keep a secret for 34 hours.

This is not some male gossip-mongering, it comes from a poll of 4,000 females. Nine out of 10 claimed to be trustworthy but nearly a third admitted to spilling the beans just hours after they had been trusted with a secret, with one in 10 of those saying they had blabbed within 45 minutes.

The study found that women are told around three secrets a week by their nearest and dearest and they are likely to pass at least one of these on to a friend.

I can’t believe it myself but apparently on average a woman spends 41 minutes a day gossiping, the most popular subjects being work, friends’ troubles, friends’ love lives and work colleagues.

I can’t wait to tell my mates about all this – in confidence of course.