Finding amusement in simple things

I wouldn't dare to claim that I never feel grumpy (at least, not on a post with open comments), but I have always been able to find amusement in small things. I think it's a gift, being able to find something to smile or laugh about in even the darkest times, and it helps to lift a humdrum day out of the ordinary and into the sublime, even if only just into. It's a small glimmer of the kind of spirit that kept the Chilean miners going, and helps most of us get through the boring work day. Without it, we would be that other kind of people. The kind who growl and scowl their way through life, determined to look on the black side and make everyone else endure that black side too. The kind you find on, say, the London Underground.

With one massive decorating project ahead of me, and about a dozen smaller "finishing off" jobs still hanging over from earlier projects, we've been to B&Q for the last two Saturdays on the run. Exactly the kind of mundane trip that provides the opportunity to exercise a finely-honed sense of the ridiculous.

First visit we were amused to notice that someone had been at the sticky letters (those you might use, for instance, to spell out your house name if you were pretentious enough to have a named house - although obviously not that pretentious if you were considering naming it with sticky letters) and had rearranged the first row of letters to spell C O C K.

On our second visit - last Saturday - one of the things on the list was a black bucket to replace the one I'd "lent" to the builders and never got back. It's the kind of thing that - being not electrical, or illuminatory, or woody, or decorative, or (particularly) gardeny - doesn't have a natural home among the labyrinthine shelves, so we scoured the aisles for several minutes looking for them... in vain. We then repeated our aisle-scouring activities in the hope of finding a B&Q operative of whom we could enquire the location of the buckets. Rounding a corner into the very last aisle, we spotted a group of three operatives enjoying a cosy chat. They were standing next to a large pile of black plastic buckets.