To be deemed a true luxury, a thing has to be regarded as an uncommon indulgence. To do it every day would devalue its specialness, no matter what M&S tells you in its advertising spiel.

By contrast, self-care is the stuff you do in the trenches of the ongoing 24-hour cycle of life. It’s the little (or big) things that get you through the grind until your allotted days of luxury: the workhorse to luxury’s thoroughbred. Consider it a daily MOT: are you worthy to continue giving your best to the road?

But let me tell you about a third way, friends, where luxury and self-care collide. I call it “self-luxe”. It’s clumsy, and in the wrong light suggests something a little more personal, I know. We can workshop a new title, but the concept is sound.

My self-luxe activity this week was a simple daytime movie trip. The rituals of movie-going are soothing and always the same: good for quieting parts of the brain, even as it engages others. At midday on a weekday, I settled into a seat on the Lower East Side and rendered my phone silent. Cinema days were a thing I did as a freelancer, once a deadline or three had been met, and I didn’t realise how much I missed them.

Sliding the credit card across the counter brought an illicit thrill – similar to the feeling adulterers get when booking a room by the hour, I reckon – that lingered all day. Emerging from hours spent indoors to a bright sky makes a person feel giddy (and somehow wealthy), especially in winter. And it was gilded with the pleasing notion that this trip was also useful, in the pursuit of mental wellbeing.

Self-luxe. Add it to your 2018 vocabulary.