Ladies, do you need a Pink Parcel? I don’t think you do. But let me tell you about it anyway in case you are tempted to “make your time of the month a little bit lovelier”. Billed as “the only monthly subscription box that will help make your period more bearable”, Pink Parcel – “It’s a monthly thing!” – costs £9.99 every, er, 28 days (£5.95 introductory offer), to be sent a few days before your period is due.

And what do you get? Tampons, for the obvious. Beauty products “for that all important pamper time”, something sweet, and some teabags because “a cup of tea solves everything!” There’s even a Teen Parcel for teenage girls, complete with Haribo sweeties, just to make sure they too get the message that your period is a punishment that deserves some consumer compensation to help you “cope”.

Is anyone else uncomfortable? One recommendation on the company’s blog gives the context: “An excellent idea. Something we all need. It helps normalise what most people make an embarrassing and awful time of the month.”

Really? Has it come to this? Sure, as Tammy Wynette reminds us, sometimes it is hard to be a woman. But is it really that hard every four weeks? It’s a weird commercialisation of menstruation, the message being that women need to compensate themselves for the injury of fate. Does tweeing up our periods solve a problem or create one?

This is not just about packaging a few products. You don’t just buy the parcel, you buy into the idea that your period is a burden and a trial and that you need a “pick-me-up” to get through it.

Maybe I’m weird, but I don’t particularly want to have anything other than a neutral attitude towards periods: I don’t want to celebrate them or denigrate them. To me, they are like owning a nose. You have it, but you do not really need to think about it. You don’t reward yourself with treats to cope with the hardship of having a nose.

There is, it should be said, a small charity aspect to Pink Parcel which launched last May and has “thousands” of subscribers, a vague number that I’m told has increased by 147% since last summer. The company encourages donations to a Kenya-based charity who make affordable sanitary pads and they’re looking at a partnership with a UK-based homelessness charity. This is laudable, I’m sure. But it’s also a piece of information that is buried on their website and so, I’m assuming, not the primary reason why you’d become a customer.

The company itself is owned by a man who wants to stay out of the spotlight. I make absolutely no comment on this whatsoever. Equal opportunities period-paranoia, please.

There is a space between public shame and public celebration. It is a space Catherine Tate might have called “bovvered”. To my mind, that is the space the period should occupy, neither glorified nor vilified nor requiring special mollifying treats.

No-one wants to live in a world where something perfectly ordinary and normal (and actually – I’m sorry, sisters – boring and unremarkable) is discussed in hushed, embarrassed tones and represented on television by a euphemistic blue liquid. But, equally, your period is not your birthday and you don’t need to send yourself a present every month to celebrate it or “make yourself feel better.”

It is just something that happens, and no matter how painful or inconvenient, isn’t a “condition” that needs to be medicated with beauty treats.