Wishing Carefully

Be careful what you wish for, they say. So when Siobhan came back from Australia with an Aboriginal dreaming bowl and invited us all to place a wish in it, I'm ashamed to say I wished for a fairy tale romance. It wasn't the kind of thing I would normally do but I was a bit wounded at the time. Even while I was folding up the note to put in the bowl, I hated Mark for turning me into the sort of person who made such pathetic wishes.

Naturally enough, I told everyone that I'd wished for peace in the Middle East. The only person I told the truth to was Siobhan - who confessed that she already knew, that after everyone had left she'd unfolded the notes and read them all. She was quick to reassure me that I wasn't alone; the person who'd claimed he'd wished for his mother's arthritis to improve had in fact wished for a silver SL320 Merc with many optional extras, including heated leather seats and a CD player.

"It's just a bit of fun," Siobhan said, but I was keen to have faith in the future, and hoped it would come true- and in a way it did...