You're in the shower, waking gently to warm water streaming down your back. The day has barely begun, the smell of breakfast is wafting through the house and you're at peace with the world.

Without warning your sleepy naked body is raked with scalding hot water.

Somebody is cleaning their teeth again without checking if you were in the shower first - or maybe they did check and flushed it anyway in a fit of early morning pique.

Sliding across the bathroom floor in pursuit of the perpetrator is fraught with danger and you fall spectacularly onto your back in a puddle of cold water, banging your head on the sink for good measure.

It takes a positive mental attitude, repeated affirmations and luck to turn the day around from here.

Back to the shower the hot water has run out leaving a cold shampoo rinse, the blunt razor tears one side of your face off and applying after shave to the open wound is a poor choice of treatment.

Going to the toilet looks simple, but the process has been sabotaged by a carefully laid strip of Glad Wrap. The added shock of no toilet paper sparks a burst of bad language and a frantic search for a mop and bucket.

Hot buttered toast will make everything better.

Or not. Today it would have been better to go back to bed and hide under the covers. It may not be safe, but it's comfortable.

Breakfast this morning consists of burnt toast, sour milk on your corn flakes and coffee with three tea spoons of salt stirred into it.

One shoe is missing, the other has a shredded lace which breaks half way through tying. Every sock is an odd sock and your expensive new white shirt has turned pink. A heated argument over whether it's pink or mauve sends you out the house early and into the car that hasn't a hope of starting.

You should give up, but no.

The grinning taxi driver is an old school friend, who chooses this morning to tell you that your colour blind soul mate is someone he slept with after they both got drunk at a school ball 20 years ago - and isn't life ironic.

Yes, isn't it.

After thumping the taxi driver and trying to explain yourself to the stern man in the police station, you turn up late for work with a neat pile of documents giving the time, date and venue of the court hearing.

You are in no mood to turn the computer on at work but you do, only to watch the confounded thing turn itself off again, and again, and again ....

Lunch is a half eaten plastic box containing partly digested dog biscuits and the children's half eaten porridge. How the dog found or why it chose to throw up in your lunch box is a mystery, but by now you accept it as inevitable.

I saw my star sign for Pisces one day which said "Do not go out today. Everything you touch will either drop off or explode. Friends really don