Why is it that everybody tends to have a bad day at exactly the same time? I am having a bad day today, and so are at least seven other people I know. General reasons range from excessive university work, to finding a dent in your car, to discovering a hole in your batman pants… (yes, that last one is me…)

When bad days happen, you just have to find a way to deal with it; sometimes, you find a friend and chew their ear off about it, other times, you get into a fight with your pillow and end up exploding feathers across the room, which ultimately frustrates you even more because you then have to clear the crime scene of feathers! Or maybe you go out, get drunk and make a fool of yourself trying to chat up a guy who you think resembles James McAvoy but who is actually more like James May; (okay, so maybe I wouldn’t say no to James May either, but that’s because he has something adorably helpless about him. He seems like a man who would appreciate my ability to make a deep-fill meat pie from scratch).

When days like these come around, I have a way of dealing with them that really works for me…perhaps you would like to try it…?

 – Stand up in the middle of the room – make sure it is the ground floor of your house, or perhaps do it outside in your garden (somewhere you won’t look like you are on drugs or in a trance).

– Imagine the whole world under your feet. You are standing on the Earth; just take a moment to comprehend the sheer size of our planet beneath your feet…

-Now take a moment to consider the space around our planet. Picture the night’s sky, the teeny tiny part of the universe that we can actually see with our own eyes. I cannot ask you to comprehend the universe; it really is too big to comprehend- just trying to imagine the infinite mass of space makes my brain ache!

– Now think about the billions and billions of stars that are in this infinite universe. Scientists believe that a millions of those stars will be similar to our own star, The Sun, and will have their own solar systems of planets. That could mean that there are millions of other planets like Earth, perhaps with creatures on them not entirely dissimilar to human beings. Alien people. There is the potential for the existence of trillions of alien people in this universe alongside us.

– Now remember where you are in the universe. Scale it back down from all those trillions of alien people, back to the billions of stars, back to the vastness of the universe, back to our tiny solar system and our one single planet with you standing on it.

You are standing on this tiny planet.

When you consider just how small you are in the grand scheme of this universe, you realise how ridiculous all those bad days are. You realise just how insignificant all those things are that make you feel rotten! To put it in another way – one that won’t make your brain hurt quite as much – in terms of size, you and I standing in the middle of this universe is roughly about the equivalent of a single amoeba sitting in the middle of Australia. We are just that small.

For some people, humans being that small may seem very depressing. But think of it like this: if Lady Gaga is the biggest person on the planet right now, try placing her in the middle of that enormous universe… she’s not that big any more, is she? The point is, dear reader, that none of it matters that much. Stop thinking about all the things that made your day bad and realise that we just happen to be lucky enough to live in the part of the universe that has Santa Claus, The Smiths and socks with sandals – that is pretty friggin’ lucky! For all the stars and planets and cubic feet of space in the whole universe, you get to eat pizza and drink vodka while watching a film by Steven Spielberg and wearing pair of tartan trousers, because you ended up right here.

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Yeah, I’ve had a bad day. Yeah, it’s not always easy living on this little rock of ours. And yeah, I will never live down admitting that I quite fancy James May. But I am alive and I can choose between apple pie and strawberry cheesecake. I bet E.T. can’t do that!