MY FAVOURITE THINGS?

    What’s your favourite colour?  What’s your favourite number?  Favourite kind of music?  Instrument?  Sport?  Car?  TV show?  Etc., etc.
    Are you one of those lucky people who can just rattle off answers to questions like this?  If you are, I stand in awe of you.  Because I cannot.
    Every so often I come across a quiz, or a curious person, and the questions start.  I want to answer them, I truly do.  It begins:
    Favourite colour?  For what?  A house?  Clothes?  Golden yellow, I guess.  Or brown.  Or blue.  It depends.
    Number?  None, really.  Five is nice, though.  Or three.  Or twenty-one.
    Music?  Baroque, but rock in the car.  Or ragtime.  It depends.
    Instrument?  Fiddle.  No, guitar.  Piano if it has a good tone, or cello.
    Sport?  To do or to watch?  So, skiing, or sailing, or hockey; it all depends.
    Car?  Easy:  Forester.  No, not any more.  Lancer.  Or maybe Soul.
    TV show?  Murdoch Mysteries.  And Midsomer Murders.  And The Blacklist.  Depends.
    See what I mean?  I realise that there is no “Depends” box to tick, and in any conversation an actual person would have given up on me ages ago.  But I just can’t help it.  For me, pretty much everything, depends.
    Depends on circumstances, on my mood, on the weather, being hungry or full, tired or alert.  Or on things I’m completely unaware of.  It all depends.
    So, when I come across these quizzes, which I sometimes like to do just for fun, or because other people ask me to so they can see how I stack up compared to them, I do try to answer.  I do.  Really.
    But after a question or two, all I’m thinking is, “it depends”, and a couple of questions later, I give up, frustrated.  Or, as I said, if this is a live conversation, the other person gives up on me, frustrated.  Either way:  frustration.
    But this morning, I tell you, it was like the sun breaking through after a long period of overcast and storm.  I had a brilliant and relieving thought.
    Well, that’s overstating it a bit.  I came upon another of these quizzes, and decided not even to try it, thereby saving myself the frustration of all the answers depending on something.  And then it hit me.
    There actually is a question that I can answer promptly, positively, certainly, and unequivocally.  Sadly, I doubt if I’ll ever find it in any quiz anywhere, but if I did, I would smile, and with pride out of all proportion to the situation, answer in a heartbeat.  The question?
    “What’s your favourite word?”
    The answer?
    “Depends.”