A good day: One where you invite some friends from church over to pray, and don’t make the mistake of putting your new Rolling Stones cd in the cd player, the one with ‘sympathy for the devil’ on it, instead of a worship cd.

(This hasn’t happened yet, but it is the kind of thing that does happen to me, the kind of thing I live in anxiety of doing).

A bad day: when something really horrible happens while you are listening to your favourite music, and you are doomed to associate it with that event forever. Neen still gets nauseous when I play a particular song in memory of her morning sickness days…

Recently, I bought two cds I’d been eyeing for ages, and when I took them home to play, found out a friend had died.

An ambivalent day: Your colleagues catch you inadvertently singing ‘Row, row, row your boat’ quietly to yourself, because of the power of infant indoctrination, and you have to carry on singing the entire song as if you really meant to, and you realize that all that separates you from a lunatic asylum, or rest home as they are euphemistically called, are a macramé kit with safety scissors and a knitted Napoleon hat.

When I was fifteen, and dying to grow up and be privy to the privileges of adulthood, nobody warned me about days like these…