I had a girlfriend (I know, I can hardly believe it myself) in school who had a mood ring. If it was blue that meant one thing, if it was purple, that meant another thing. If it was bluey-purple, that meant… something else. Blue and purple seemed to be the main colour options. What colour meant what is, as you see, beyond me. I devised a simple way to decode what the mood ring said – anything between and including blue and purple meant ‘daft bint who is into palm reading’. You can’t take a mood ring too seriously if the shop it came from has Ozric Tentacles playing, bongs the size of watermelons, and a person behind the till who smells of patchouli.

This blog is my mood ring. Flippant, irrelevant bollocks such as this indicates that I am in a playful, generally jolly mood. The cat hasn’t been pestering me too much, I’m in danger of achieving some things today, and shuffle is bringing round some quality tunes. If I write about Iraq or politics it invariably means I’ve been overrun with a cold, dark dread that the world is going to hell around us. By this rationale, Daily Mail journalists are all really depressed the whole time.