Madonna is eternally fascinating. Does she never get tired of putting on the fishnets and impossible shoes and sussing out the next new thing, alongside touring and having six children? No: she is Madonna, and whenever she posts pictures of herself and her kids singing in the car, they are wonderful and unexpected. Her latest remarks about how giving her children smartphones disrupted her relationship with them have been picked up as “evidence” by us mere mortals that phones are bad. But we always knew she was a control freak.

What interested me far more – because they were more ambivalent and difficult – were her comments about her daughter not having her drive. Lourdes, she says, is talented, but she had a mother. Madonna didn’t and attributes much of her own ambition to this. To be the daughter of Madonna, brought up with both love and celebrity, must be strange indeed. Madonna sees the drive, however, in her son David Banda – and has moved to Lisbon because he has been signed by SL Benfica Juniors, turning her into a superstar soccer mom. He has her DNA, she says, in a quip that pushes the boundaries yet again, for David was adopted.

It is just this that continues to amaze. It doesn’t matter whether I care for her new single or the inane Vogue bumpf about her incredibly toned legs. It is when she talks of her life as a survivor that makes us see how she refuses to bow to conventions day in, day out. Accepting a Glaad (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) award, she talked of arriving in New York as the black cloud of Aids spread “and in a blink of an eye took out all my friends”.

When she is hushed up for being too old, or dismissed for acting inappropriately, I thank God that she has lived through much loss to tell so many tales. With everyday joy.