I SOMETIMES wonder how it would have affected me if my mother and father had never met. I mean, might I still have been created but by a different couple who with their different genetic make-up to my actual parents would have produced a different child - but who still would have been me?

And would the other me have grown up to marry the same woman or would I have wed somebody else?

And what would the knock-on effect have been on our two children? Would they have been different, too? Indeed, would our family have even had the same pet dog?

"An interesting concept, don't you think?" I observed at a social gathering the other evening. The other people in the room shifted uncomfortably in their chairs and glanced nervously at our host for guidance.

The host cleared his throat. "Er...I'm just wondering, Mr Silver, whether group therapy is going to suit you after all. Perhaps you'd like to go away now and think about what I've just said."

I shrugged and left the room. I heard the door being locked and bolted behind me.

"Nobody understands what I'm getting at," I grumbled to my wife when I arrived home.

"Do you wonder?" she said. "I don't think you're on the same plane as the rest of mankind."

I dived to the floor and assumed the foetal position. "Don't mention the word plane," I cried. "You know I hate flying."

"Very well then," my wife sighed. "You're not on the same planet."

"Wouldn't it be funny," I mused getting up from the carpet, "if in another galaxy far, far away there was a planet identical to Earth and with a Dave Silver doppelganger living on it."

"I don't think the universe could cope with two of you," my wife said.

"Ah!" I said. "But which universe are you referring to?"

"Why don't you try psychoanalysis," my wife suggested through gritted teeth.

"I did," I said. "And they sent me to group therapy."

I stepped outside and looked up at the stars. My dog Brian toddled out to join me on the back doorstep. He, too, gazed up into the heavens, no doubt wondering what the hell I was staring at.

"You wouldn't understand, Brian," I sighed. "Your world is just a bone to gnaw on and a basket to sleep in."

Brian shrugged and went back inside.

Which reminds me. When I was a young man I used to frequent coffee bars with my best friend Jack.

Our mission, should we wish to accept it - and we always did - was to chat up girls in the hope that they would accompany us to the pictures or the dance hall the following Saturday night.

"Is there a thief in your family?" my best friend Jack asked this gorgeous young blonde thing one night in July, 1962.

"Huh?" replied the gorgeous young blonde thing.

"Well," breathed Jack down her ear, "I reckon there has to be a thief in your family because someone stole the stars and put them in your eyes."

"Wow!" exclaimed the blonde, fluttering her eyelashes. "I think this is the start of a wonderful relationship."

And she grabbed Jack's hand and whisked him away for an evening of romance - leaving me alone and envious.

So I plucked up the courage and sidled over to this girl who was likewise sitting on her own, blowing the froth off her coffee.

"Er...you don't know me," I stammered.

"And I'd be deliriously happy to keep it that way," said the girl.

I tried another tack. "Have you ever wondered how it would have affected you if your mother and father had never met? I mean, would you have still been you, albeit with different parents?"

"Have you ever considered treatment for the deeply disturbed?" the girl said.

That's two strikes, I thought. One more and I'm out.

"Tell me something," I said in one last desperate gamble. "Is there a thief in your family?" The girl hauled back and slapped me across the face. "So what if I do have a brother in Strangeways!" she snapped. "What's it to do with you, Shorty!"

I've never been lucky with women. Maybe that's why I dream about Dolly Parton a lot.

Mind you, in the old days, before Dolly Parton became famous, I used to dream about Cyd Charisse.

"Who?" my wife asked when I stepped back into the house after surveying the stars from the back doorstep.

"Cyd Charisse," I repeated. "She was a long-legged dancer who appeared in MGM musicals in the '50s. Although which leg was the long one I never could tell."

My wife shook her head. "Maybe you should try counselling," she suggested.

"I did," I said. "And they sent me to the psychoanalyst who sent me to group therapy."

"Then all is lost," my wife lamented.

"That's exactly what my mother observed one morning when she shook me awake in the middle of a Cyd Charisse dream. She told me to get up or I would be late for school."

My wife raised an eyebrow. "And you replied?"

"No rush, mother. School doesn't shut till half-past three." DAVID SILVER

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.