SOMETHING very important happened to me last Monday: I woke up.

I don’t normally dwell much on being granted another day on the earth, or give much thought to how many times it has happened so far.

But last Monday was different, because waking up for yet another day took on a whole new significance.

It was the day I reached the age of exactly 53 years and 341 days – precisely one day more than my father.

I always considered him to have died young, but it’s only now that I am the same age that I fully understand just how young he was.

But that happened a long time ago – more than 38 years ago, in fact – so this isn’t about his death as much as it is about my life.

I don’t expect to die any time soon and if I am lucky I might even be only half way to my destination. And when I get philosophical and serious (and maybe even morbid) about these things, I always like to remember what Bob Monkhouse said.

“My ambition is to live forever,” he once joked. “So far, so good!” And it still makes me smile, even now that he is, of course, the late Bob Monkhouse.

So even though I have no reason to feel pessimistic, since last Monday every day I wake up feels like a bonus in a way it never did before.

But waking up is not all that happened to me last Monday.

I hadn’t even been awake long enough to put my contact lenses in when it became a day we’ll remember for years to come, because it began with my wife shouting some unprecedented news through the bathroom door.

“Come out quick,” she said. “Somebody has sprayed blue paint all over the car.”

As it turned out, “all over” was a bit of an exaggeration because, in fact, it was only a single wavy line, all down one side of our little white car, but it’s not what you expect when you wake up on a Monday morning.

All our neighbours’ cars were untouched, so (assuming the perpetrator didn’t have it in for us in particular) we came to the conclusion we were just random victims of a mindless vandal.

Thankfully, the paint hadn’t properly dried, and apart from faint traces that will need more attention, within an hour I had removed it.

During that hour of scrubbing, I can’t deny that I muttered a few words under my breath that you won’t see in the Bible, but I soon remembered it was the day my father never reached.

I believe the correct way to react to somebody vandalising your car is to say what you would do if you could get your hands on them, and think of orifices in which you might try to insert a spray can.

But I was thinking of all those people in the world who would be waking up to the worst day of their lives, and those who were not going to see tomorrow.

In the circumstances, only a fool would allow the spraying of some blue paint, however pointless, to cloud his day for long, and I even confess to feeling sorry for our unknown artist.

After all, the worst thing that happened to me last Monday was I had to waste an hour cleaning the car.

But somewhere in Swindon, somebody is waking up and feeling so aimless that his only idea for making the most of his day is to spray paint on somebody else’s car.

Imagine if you woke up every day and felt like that.