I hauled myself painfully out of bed at only the second alarm, and dragged myself into work for the first time in two weeks.

On the way in I stopped for petrol. My current habit whenever I buy petrol is to write down the details: date, volume, price and current mileage. (This is so that I can later on work out my car's real fuel consumption and compare it with the advertised one, so I can get a genuinely accurate figure for the total cost of car ownership, and generally just in case it comes in handy for any other reasons.) I did manage to write all that down this morning, but then I dropped the pencil into the passenger-side footwell. When I got to work I looked for the pencil and it simply wasn't there. Neither had it ended up down the side of the seat, or rolled into the rear footwell. I couldn't find it at all. I have a horrible feeling it's somehow managed to fall into a vital mechanism of some sort and this evening I'll change gears and hear an HB crunching noise.

Then I walked into the office, sat down at my desk, and discovered that a localised network outage had taken out my computer and about four near it. After all that, I could have had another hour in bed if only I'd known!

Clearly it is going to be one of those days. I also have two hundred and thirty emails to clear out of my inbox from the last two weeks…

As I was walking to Tesco to buy lunch just now, a very pretty girl going the other way on a bicycle gave me a dazzling smile.

My first thought was to wonder if she was someone I knew but hadn't immediately recognised. My second was to wonder if I might have appeared to be smiling at her due to screwing up my face slightly because I was facing into the sun. The idea that she might have smiled at me just because she felt like brightening my day only came third, and by the time it occurred to me to just take the smile for what it was and have my day brightened by it regardless of the reason, I'd already spent too long trying to work out the motivation for it and puzzlement was outweighing pleasure. Deliberately smiling back certainly wasn't an option, because by the time I thought of it she was long gone.

I think my problem is that the wrong parts of my brain are the quickest to start up, so that I've already looked it in the mouth by the time I notice that it's a gift horse. Sigh.