A lot of comedians like to take the occasional stab at religion. They compare gods to fairies and the Christian Bible to a bad paperback novel; they do it well and they make me laugh. But me, I'm always careful not to poke fun at religion. This is in part because I am a spineless nematode who is afraid of offending, but mostly because of my skewed version of Pascal's Wager, where I think of life as a sort of mystery novel. I'm taking in all of the things the characters say and do as I go along, but keeping my options open so that when it eventually gets to the bit where they reveal who dunnit I can pretend to myself that I knew all along who it was. Yes, hello, Allah. I knew it was you. I never once said bad things about you, and I'm fairly sure my bathroom window faces Mecca. Please let me in. I've brought you a lovely jar of pickles and a bottle of red wi- juice of some sort.

I noticed recently that I have an odd habit of subconsciously obsessing over whether my friends and family find things as funny as I do. Whenever I am watching something that is in any way amusing to me - whether it is gently tickling me in special places and making me giggle, or just ramming two fingers up my laughter socket and making me explode into paroxysms of out-loud guffaws, I always have to sneak a sideways glance at whomever is there with me to make sure they find it funny too. Lord knows why I give a rat's, as I haven't yet worked out what I intend to do with the information once I've got it.

Honestly, I think a sense of humour is a very personal thing and really exposing your own sense of humour can be a bit like doing a nudie run through an office. It can make you cool or it can make you the outcast, and in any case you're naked. Some people have a big, hairy sense of humour. It makes people cringe and stare but it has a unique appeal of its own. Some people have a very clean-cut sense of humour, carefully trimmed and not too far from what is expected. And some people have strange piercings dangling out of the most unexpected parts of their sense of humour, which can be great, but it also causes said sense of humour to snag on zippers and attract exotic infections.

So to be safe, we laugh when everybody else laughs, pretend not to notice when everybody else cries, and hope above all that we've buttoned up properly and there isn't some unsavoury part of our humour peeking out at the world, inappropriately exposed.

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Things that made me happy today:

- Not cooking dinner, and instead accepting Daniel's offering of bangers and mash as a suitable alternative to anything of nutritional value. To be fair, we did also have peas.