My mother, like most mothers, is a source of never ending amusement and irritation. Amusement as she drags her size sixteen body off her newly bought bicycle she bought in order to get fit by cycling to work – conveniently forgetting she works two blocks away from the house. And irritation as she is so very dim and difficult, like a petulant child she demands constant attention and gentle handling.

Yesterday she was sitting at the dining room table and waxing lyric on the latest trip to Sainsbury’s where, low and behold, she bumped into someone she knew. What are the chances? I failed to escape her laser-like glare, so she turned to me, smiling brightly and said, “The Musician is so very nice, isn’t he?”
Nice? I looked at her in horror. What on earth has nice got to do with the intelligent, witty, slightly selfish, egotistical, gentle, drawling man with the funny, oversized hair that I date? Nice is a horrible word, it describes the uninteresting, the mundane. I’d describe Bolognaise as nice, I’d describe my morning eggnog latte as nice (change that – my eggnog latte is heaven) and it’s also the way I’d describe a Christmas card with a watercolour ice skating scene on the front, right before I threw it in the bin. And I wouldn’t mean it. Nice is a non-word; it’s stuck in the same linguistic bin as ‘average’ ‘pleasing’  ‘R.E.M’ and ‘adequate’.

Then, when I was too tired to watch C.S.I New York, I mulled it over a bit. What word would I use to describe him instead? Amazing? Hell no - he certainly isn’t. And if he were, wouldn’t Amazing get a bit tiresome after a while? – I think that Dinosaurs are pretty amazing, would I want to date one of those? Unlikely. I think that the Winter Palace in Russia is amazing, but I wouldn’t want to live there. So what else? Incredible, impressive, significant? These are all words that I’d associate with a fleeting emotion; they have no permanence because if they did, they’d cease to maintain their greatness – they would instead become, well, nice.

Maybe it’s time to stop with heartbreaking, exciting, troublesome affairs. Maybe now I’m a little tired of seeing the firework displays and have become more of a girl that hankers after a living room fire and a mug of tea. Which would make a nice change.