Happiness is being woken by a text message from someone much more hungover than you in time to take some painkillers and fall back into a voluptuous doze a full hour before your actual alarm goes off.

Happiness is opening the kitchen door to find the utter carnage wrought by last night’s dinner with five excellent and beloved friends, and not minding a bit.

Happiness is discovering that the belt you bought years ago for work in the mental hospital actually looks pretty good when teamed with your new dress, which has swans on it – and that you totally OWN those swans, like you’re the fucking QUEEN or something.

Happiness is the welcome revelation that your new swan dress doesn’t fly up into your face or plaster itself obscenely to your groin when you ride your bicycle, but instead flutters demurely around knee level, just like Jeanne Moreau’s in Jules et Jim.

Happiness is glancing at your reflection in a shop window as you cycle past and realising that you actually look more like the Wicked Witch Of The West than Jeanne Moreau, but deciding to run with it, screaming ‘FLY, MY PRETTIES, FLY’ at an astonished bus driver as you cheekily overtake.

Happiness is getting the giggles during mass when the problem child (who is also your favourite child) from the children’s choir uses the shaft of sunlight pouring in from the windows high above to make anatomically correct animal shadows ten feet from the altar.

Happiness is scrambled eggs on toast studded with shards of crispy bacon, a mug of fresh black coffee, and switching on the radio to the finale of Shostakovich’s fifth symphony*.

Happiness is watching the supermodel fails video for the millionth time, only now with the sound off and this playing in the background instead.

Happiness is letting your mind wander to the impossibly kind, gentle man who kissed your forehead so tenderly when he said goodbye, and knowing that it will be time for hello again soon.

Happiness is realising that you’re in just too good a place to write cynically about body hair, and that some weekends are made for curling up on the sofa with Shakespeare.

Happiness is realising that you’re bound to be miserable again before long.

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* being played at a much more manageable speed than you remember being made to do when you were 15. You KNEW that was ambitious. You were SO RIGHT.