She’s sitting on my knee as we speak, chewing through a tape, slowly, carefully, with great precision and attention to detail. Every few minutes or so, she’ll cut off sound in the left headphone, so I’ll turn from my typing, flick her onto auto-reverse, shake her a bit, and then flick her back again when she decides to play nicely. I don’t mind.

Because I love her. I do. Like only a mother could.

***********

I’ve loved her since I bought her; around this time last year, from Argos in Oban, if you’re interested, for a not unreasonable price, just before a 17 hour coach journey. It was a neccesary purchase, and I’ve never regretted it. Much. I was in a hurry, so I bought an updated model of the personal stereo I used to have, which died after I poured half a can of coke over it – by mistake, you understand. The one before that had been terrible, its only redeeming feature being a rather natty pair of headphones, which were never the same after being caught in the car door and dragged along the M1 halfway to London. We arrived at a lay-by Happy Eater to discover I had a personal stereo with two frayed-wires sticking out of it.

But my present companion is still intact. On the outside at least. It seems more and more that she suffers from some form of electronic dementia. Although a two-way playing thing, she decided after a while that she was happier going only one, and that one was sometimes too much for her. She tires easily, bless her.

But you just have wean her back to health. Unless you listen to tapes constantly (who does? It would certainly be hard for me, she’s chewed most of them up in various spats and diva fits) she forgets how to play them at all, and once you’ve gone through the procedure slowly, usually crimping several metres of tape in the process, she’s happy to sit and play for you as long as you don’t move, stop, or rewind. Much.

And then, having ground her way through most of one side, she’ll decide the effort is too much. and stop. Or flip the tape over and throttle it. So you have to catch her as soon as she gives up, make her stop, turn her over manually, rewind and play to the middle of the next side, every time you turn the tape over you’ll get to listen slightly longer, and each new song, or even bit-of-song is a triumph. Eventually you’ll be working together in perfect harmony.

Until I put her down again for a couple of weeks, at which point she goes in a terrible mood and refuses to do anything at all. But I love her. I do. Why else would it be called a “personal” stereo?  It’s a stereo only I know how to make work. And come what may, I WILL make it work.

Extremely bored this morning I started thinking about April Fool’s Day jokes for next year. I’ve never been very good at them, see, and I thought if I gave myself several months to think about it, I might be able to come up with something, anything, for once. I usually come up with something great by about April 2nd. And then forget by April 3rd.

So I looked on next year’s calendar to see if we’ll have guests that day. And blow me down, if it isn’t Easter Monday. That’s Bank Holiday Monday to the rest of us, but Easter’s kind of a big thing around here, although to be brutally honest I’m very sceptical about the whole thing.

But the placing of April Fool’s day made me think. AFD is a pretty old tradition, right? Lets say BCE old? And Easter moves around each year, right? So let’s say there’s a chance that what we now call “Easter Sunday”, when someone was supposed to rise from the dead (which, lets face it, is quite unlikely and seems to smack of April Fool to me) fell on April the first.

Do you follow me?

I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, there’s something that theologians might not have taken into account all this time.

Interesting.

I’m still not sure what I want to be when I grow up. Some days I want to be a director, some days a writer, some days an acting tutor, some days an actress, some days to sit around and make beautiful things that people will look at and be happy, and sometimes when I have someone else’s child in my arms, I just want to go and live on a farm with ducks and chickens and cats, or in a city with busy-ness and noise and lots of life and things, and have lots and lots of children. Well, a couple anyway. I’ll just keep having them until I get bored.

(I was once coming home from a gig late at night, and just outside Ladbroke Grove Tube station, A man stopped me, from his position on the pavement, and, clutching his bottle of cider in one hand he pointed at me with the other and gave me an incredible piece of advice — “What you’ve got to do, y’see. What you’ve got to do, is to live forever. Or until you get bored”)

When I was little, I seem to remember, I wanted to be a fairy princess, then a teacher, a mum, a jazz singer, a lawyer, a bassist in a band (I can’t play a journalist, an actress, and all sorts of other random things. Usually for less than a week did I want to be these things, but they were aspirations all the same.