I don't care if people think I'm precious. The thing is, I love my cleanliness and my little daily rituals and routines and little, neaty thingies. I will now finally admit - online and so not boasting of the slightest ounce of pluck - that I am a bloody, prissy, fussy, uptight, nervous, fluttery, fastidious piece of poncy PRECIOUS.

There are a couple of possible explanations for my current predicament. One, and the most obvious, is my mother (who I love to bits, just to make it clear early on) and her absolutely maniacal, pathological abhorrence of any germ matter of any kind anywhere near the vicinity where she or her immediate family draw breath. From a young age, from the flower of my puddle-splashingly enthusiastic youth, I was brought to the unpleasant realisation that there were certain things that I must avoid at all costs. Mud, public swimming pools, friends' houses for sleepovers and cats and dogs ranked at the top, as did food prepared by strangers (especially if they were not as pathologically maniacal towards hygiene as herself). Perhaps there was a time when I could still have grown up to be adventurous enough to use public toilets without first covering the seats with wads of toilet paper, but through the fanatically anti-germ child-rearing process, that point quickly disappeared, like a half-glimpsed train station from the window of a dizzy express.

The second possible cause is heredity. I come from a long line of Nazi cleaning ladies on my father's side and an even longer and more fanatical one on my mother's. One of my mother's sisters once stayed with us for a while and I can still remember the way she used to interrupt some of her tete-a-tetes with my mother to bend down and pick up absolutely nothing from the floor to throw into a waiting decorative ashtray on the coffee table. "What is it, kháti?" Mum would ask. Auntie would tell her in their language that it was some crumb or speck (which she herself had not dropped, as that would make world headlines), while I looked on with a mixture of bewilderment and exasperated affection.

So to get back to the topic, these are may see it or they may not, but simply typing it makes me feel better. Or maybe I just want to believe that. Nothing is really certain. Life is a risky parade of inconvenient events, sometimes masquerading as serendipities.