Perfect Days...1

Recently I was telling a friend about a wonderful day I had. Everything fell into place - an exhibition was wonderful, a parking space emerged just at the right moment, the film was great, a table was free at the restaurant we wanted because someone who'd booked hadn't turned up. It was a perfect day. 'You ought to write it up as a short story,' the friend said.

Which of course explains why I'm a writer and my friend isn't.

Because who in the world wants to read about someone else's great day? We want to read about a great day that goes wrong. Or a bad day that turns out to have been perfect because something so marvellous happens at the end, it makes all the bad stuff worth while.

It's about change. You start out in one state - happy, sad, jealous, anxious, whatever - and end up in a different place. It's a perfect day so it has to go wrong. It's a bad day, so it has to end up perfect. You go from A to B. The non-stop perfect day is like going from A to A.

But that's fiction, of course. In real life, my perfect day was A all the way, and very enjoyable it was too.