In which I touch upon a son’s disrespect for the 5th Commandment, the weather, the importance of ‘a glass of something’ and the Last Days, but please don’t be alarmed by the biblical references. (Biblical! Capital B! ED)

Sitting outside our cottage in the garden just now on one of those rare days of warmth and sunshine we are granted by the good Lord here in Old Blighty, I recalled a conversation I had with my son W. a few days ago. It was the same set-up: I was sitting in the garden with a glass of something to hand and it was sunny, though with the one main difference that it was hot. Very hot, in fact, but not too hot.

Courtesy of ‘global warming’ – actually ‘climate change’ is now the more modern and more correct term to use, and apparently the problem is getting so serious in some English counties, Hampshire, I believe and Derbyshire and Cumbria you can now be fined for calling it ‘global warming’. It has to be ‘climate change’, so that we are all signed up to sing from the same hymn sheet. Wasn’t it Archbishop William Laud who observed quite wisely . . . (No it wasn’t and get on with it! Ed) — courtesy of ‘climate change’ we had been basking in very hot weather for several days. Well, comparatively very hot here in Britain, where the Met Office designates ‘a sunny day’ by how many queues of more than 10ft long form outside My Whippy vans in designated seaside resorts.

Today is not at all hot, but what we middle-class white folk have been taught to call ‘very pleasant’, and if we are in the company of someone who went to the right school, we are encouraged to describe the day as ‘very pleasant indeed’, to ensure they know that we, too went, to the right school. But as I was saying. . .

The other day I was also sitting outside (reading up on more guff about that old fraud Ernest Hemingway, but that’s not relevant, I just want to assure you I wasn’t frittering my time away) and the spot I have chosen was just outside my son’s downstairs bedroom, which was once the utility room, that is where we had our chest freeze, washing machine, my desk and computer and whatever crap we couldn’t stash elsewhere. (It’s a lot nicer now.) At that spot is a wooden table and a solid wooden chair I treated myself to, to use on just such occasions as these). Anyway . . .

After some minutes I went inside to get something from the kitchen (no doubt to top up my glass of something, ouzo and Pernod are my current tipple) and my son, who bedroom (that is the former utility room is next to the kitchen asked me: ‘Where you talking to yourself, Dad?’ Well, as it happens I was. As it happens I do that quite a bit, usually imaginary conversation I have with people.

‘That’s odd,’ he said.

‘No, it isn’t,’ I replied. ‘I was daydreaming.’

Well, I was, and I do daydream quite bit (and have always done so which led to an awful lot of trouble at work when I was not concentrating one what I was reading).

‘It’s still odd,’ he said. And that’s how we left it. Trying to persuade someone that daydreaming ‘is not odd’ (even if it involves having imaginary conversations) is rather more pointless than trying to persuade someone who is convinced the Moon is made of cheese or that aliens built the pyramids that it isn’t and they didn’t. My advice in that situation is to cut your losses and shut up and go and top up your glass of something.

Here are the inside of my shed (pictured below, and I have to say more comfortable than the small corner of the utility room I was granted), the table outside my son’s room where I sit (also pictured), and — as a bonus, a snap I took by mistake but which I quite like (the one that doesn’t look like the inside of a man cave or an outdoor wooden table. You'll spot it, hard to miss). I’ve added copies of all three piccies in black and white for those souls who still like to call radios ‘the wireless’ and think the internet and ‘streaming’ are indubitably signs of the Last Days.

Pip, pip.

Incidentally, my son has in the past also accused my of being ‘theatrical’. I took exception to that, but let the matter rest at the time when we established he didn’t mean the word as code for ‘gay’.