ONE of the things at which I am quite good is swinging. I do not mean the pampas grass/Channel 5 documentary variety, I mean the hanging from a rope variety.

I have always had an appreciation of the physics involved, thanks to years of watching Spider-Man on the television, and, insofar as I can be graceful doing anything, I appear effortless when I swoop through the air. I would probably have made a decent trapeze artist, were it not for my poor depth perception and crippling fear of heights.

In any case, it is not really a CV skill, but it came in useful when I was made to go on an adventure trail.

This trail involved for the most part various unlikely ways of crossing a stream, including rickety ladders, spring-mounted bridges, and rope swings. I was in my element (air), which prevented me from being in not my element (water).

And behind the laughter, derision, and, frankly, insults issuing from the various children with me – ostensibly amused by the sight of a man in his early forties, in his third-best jeans, and with a crippling fear of heights, trying to get his leg over a scramble net – I detected admiration.

In short, it was not my fault that I began to feel invincible and allowed the Bad Thing That Happened to happen. It was their fault for lulling me into a false sense of security and a true sense of stupidity.

There was a children’s roundabout. But this roundabout was not powered by the hand of a slightly envious parent. It was rotated, through a series of cogs and pulleys, by an 8ft-tall hamster wheel.

As I arrived at the roundabout, there was a man running in the hamster wheel, powering my own children’s ride. On a normal day, I would have thought nothing of this, but I had had my head turned by easy swings and slightly more complicated ladders.

“That looks like fun,” I thought. “I want a go.” And with those words I sealed my fate.

I sidled over to the wheel and the man eventually, if reluctantly, concluded that his fun was over.

He brought the wheel to a stop and alighted.

I stepped into the metal wheel and examined it. “How do I get this to move?” I wondered.

This was not my milieu. I am not a hamster, I am a man. I don’t store food in my cheeks. I have never gnawed on railings, not even at school. And when I see a pile of shredded paper on the floor, I think: “You have to tidy this before somebody gets home.” I don’t think: “Mmm, that looks comfy. Time for a snooze.”

I stepped forward. Nothing happened. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the man I had displaced chuckling. “Amateur,” he was clearly thinking. I took another step, as if attempting to walk up the side, and the wheel started to move.

I continued to walk, spinning the wheel. It sped up and I began to jog, breaking into a steady run. The roundabout was turning, the wheel was spinning. It really was fun.

“Look,” I overheard the man say to his wife. “His technique’s shocking. He’s got no rhythm.”

This man had actually practised. He was clearly a seasoned hamster wheel enthusiast. “Technique? Rhythm?” I thought. “Why do I need such things?”

It was at this point I realised I had no idea how to stop. I tried to slow down, but the wheel wouldn’t let me. I had to run to stop myself from falling over. And running made the wheel move ever faster. It was a vicious circle. Literally.

I suppose I could have jumped off and let the wheel slow naturally, but I was not as acquainted with the physics of human-size hamster wheels as I am with rope swings.

Inevitably I fell, and was dragged backwards around the wheel until gravity prevailed and I tumbled over and over until my elbow was skinned and the wheel had stopped.

The Amazing Hamster- Man was still there with his wife, watching and chuckling. I felt sorry for her. If I was correct in my assumptions about her husband, she would have to listen to this anecdote all the way home, and then every couple of weeks for the rest of her grim life.

I staggered away, and stood behind an 11-year-old, waiting for my turn on the zip wire. “Stick to what you’re good at,” I thought, as I nursed my injuries. “Swinging on ropes and judging people”.

I HAVE been away at a maximum-security forest holiday village. It is wrong to identify it by name, let us just call it Boden Butlins.

It has involved more swimming with young children than would normally be expected during a typical week, in the super-tropical thunderdome, I think it’s called.

“Swimming” is probably overstating the nature of the activity. One does not swim with young children. What one does is crouch, trying not to fall over, for an hour and a half to two hours, while the children have a whale calf of a time.

This teaches us a valuable lesson about context. If I attempted a cossack dancing stance while three-quarters naked in Marks & Spencer I would end up on some sort of register, but nobody bats a soggy eyelash at the pool.

Anyway, I don’t normally mind having my swimming activity curtailed. After all, it is “for the kids”. Also, I am not one of nature’s swimmers.

In fact, I think one of my best days was when that first proto-human crawled out of the water, flopped onto the sand, and thought, “Wow, this golden area with non-slippy rocks will make a great home. There are no sharks and it’s much easier to breathe. It will be even better when somebody invents towels.”

And I wasn’t even alive then, which just goes to show how many great days I have had.

However, on this occasion I did object, because I had been landed with the ring.

I have written before how I am plagued by things with holes in, e.g. front-door doughnuts, molar-destroying onion rings, my monthly budget. But this was the worst of the lot, a gargantuan inflatable ring, with which the children in my charge played for a maximum of 97 seconds over the two-hour period.

For the rest of the time I had to hold this colossal ring. It was like winning a large plush elephant at the coconut shy shortly after arriving at the fair and then having to lug it around for the rest of the day. (I imagine. I’ve never been able to knock off a coconut, but bear with me for the sake of the metaphor.) It’s a massive pain, but complaining about it makes one sound like Trevor Wet-Blanket, hon. sec. of the SWBBTGVS (Scrooge Was Better Before The Ghosts Visited Society).

But as I stood there, lumbered with Rubberhenge, I was comforted by the fact this was at least an improvement on what had happened earlier, when I attempted to inflate it.

I was standing in my trunks at a table by the side of the pool, and opened the valve. This was a big ask, I accept – this was no namby-pamby party balloon – but I am full of air and so I blew hard.

I felt my head go light. I think I saw stars. I had made precisely zero impact on the rubber ring. There was a man in late middle age on the next table. He gave me a look of understanding. This was a man who had been where I was, and left it behind, perhaps even with a sense of regret.

I parped into the ring again, with fresh resolve and more effort than I have ever expended on anything. I looked at the ring again. A deep wrinkle at the bottom of the hoop appeared to be slightly shallower.

OK, I thought, this is going to take a while, but I am having an effect on this thing. I blew again. My eyes popped. The man on the next table smiled, perhaps a little too much for the sake of solidarity.

A small crowd gathered, all astounded by the purple man.

I tried again, and again. Each time I could see a tiny smoothing in the ridged texture of the ring. Each time, I was aware of the man on the next table chuckling.

This is beyond me, I thought. I need the breath control of Bill Withers, or that man who did the longest trombone note ever on Roy Castle’s Record Breakers. Yes, I know my references are not very contemporary, but we can’t all be Jasper Carrott.

No, I thought, I have to do this. For the children.

Also so that the man on the next table, who was now rolling on the floor, hooting, tears of mirth streaming from his eyes, did not see me give up after ten minutes of effort.

He composed himself. “You know you can get that blown up over there?” he said, pointing over my shoulder.

About 20 feet behind me was a lifeguard surrounded by inflatable toys, with a pressurized nozzle in his hand.

I need a holiday.

I SAT in the dentist’s waiting room and looked around for something to pass the time.

But apart from some leaflets and posters around the place explaining the importance of looking after one’s teeth – a massive “I told you so, Myrtle” to everybody sitting there – there was nothing to read.

So all I could do was sit there and think about what was about to happen. This was not very much – it was only the dental hygienist for a small repair on a chipped molar and a scale and polish. Nothing at all to worry about…

Gary, stop now.

My name was called, and the dental hygienist, a pleasant young woman, asked me to sit in the dentist’s chair. I noticed a sign as I sat down which said the surgery was open until 8pm. My previous dental appointment had been at 8am. I got a B in my maths GCSE, so I quickly worked out that was a 12-hour day.

I didn’t much fancy the thought of people who put drills in other people’s mouths working 12-hour days. There must be a shift system in place, I thought, so I…

Gary, seriously, stop this now…

I’m sorry, who is this?

I’m one of the voices which tells you what to think about things.

What, are you Twitter?

No. You know how you’ve got a conscience which stops you from doing bad things?

Kind of …

Well, I’m like that, but I’m the one which stops you from doing stupid things.

Right. So if that’s true, where have you been for 41 years, matey? You are the worst “stopping people from doing stupid things” voice ever.

You never listen to me.

Why now? What stupid thing am I about to do?

You’re going to tell the readers what you said to the dental hygienist. It’s a very, very bad idea.

Well, I know it was a stupid thing to say, but I’ve got a deadline, and it’s not as if I’ve got much of a reputation to trash.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

Sorry, readers… So I made a bit of chit-chat with the hygienist about how good the air conditioning was, and how I could lie there all day.

And then, with the potentially 12-hour shifts of the surgery in mind, I turned to the dental hygienist and I asked her, “What time do you finish work?”

She looked at me in horror. I didn’t count, but possibly three seconds of silence occurred. That doesn’t sound much, but try counting them.

“I finish at five and then I go home to my baby, which WE’VE just had,” she said. Then she pushed some instruments into my mouth and I couldn’t explain. And the moment was lost.

Gary, you don’t ask a woman what time she finishes work.

I know!

Not even if she’s a taxi driver.

I know! Do you write the posters in dentists’ waiting rooms? Yes, but if I write a column about it, I can sort of explain that I wasn’t flirting and everything will be all right.

Oh, God, it’s not going to be all right, is it? I just look as if I’m justifying myself after the event so she doesn’t “accidentally” smack me in the mouth with something metal the next time I see her.

Yes, Gary, at best you look like an idiot. At worst you look like a lecherous and mendacious flirt. And now everybody knows about it.

I wasn’t flirting! I am so bad at flirting I am even terrible at not flirting, apparently. Where were you before I opened my mouth, Mister Wise-after-the-event?

I told you, you never listen to me. If you listened to me, you wouldn’t have a column in which you explain every week in detail how incapable you are.

Aha! I knew there was a good reason.

On the other hand, if you listened to me you would be rich and successful.

Swings and roundabouts, isn’t it?

Yes, Gary, except the swings are massive and made of gold, and the roundabouts are tiny and made of manure, and you never get to go on the swings.

AT THE time of writing it is still Quite Warm. It is entirely possible that normal British summer service will have been resumed when you read this, but at the moment it is like living in some sort of science-fiction movie in which the earth moves ever closer to the sun and men respond by wearing flip-flops.

Reading recent columns, you might have been led into thinking that the relentless heat – or the “bit-nippy-might-need-a- coat” season if you’re African – irks me.

And if you have that impression you have got me bang to rights. I just want a world in which grass is the colour of grass and not the colour of Gwyneth Paltrow’s hair. I just want a world in which I can have a shower before I go to bed and not need another as soon as I wake up. I just want a world in which, when I go to bed, in order to be comfortable I am not forced to turn my bedroom into an all-you-can-eat buffet for insects.

More to the point, I just want a world in which attempting to keep cool does not make me look like a dangerously inept chump.

But we do not live in that perfect world. We live in a world in which somebody can have the job title “service lead for liveability”, in which television news channels focus for hours on end on a closed door, and in which a woman who wore too much blue eye-shadow on The Apprentice is employed as a social commentator.

And as proof that we do not live in that perfect world, I will tell you about The Bad Thing That Happened.

I was walking to work and I was feeling hot – not in the Beyonce sense, more in the Windsor Davies sense. I passed one of those coffee shops of the sort I visited last week, and there was a sign in the window for a “mango and passion fruit cooler”.

“That’s just the ticket,” I thought. “I like mango. I am not unduly put off by passion fruit. And cooler? That is exactly what I want to be. It is written in the stars. Surely they can’t expect me to make that for myself.” I removed my sunglasses – for anybody who wears sunglasses indoors is a fool unless he be Stevie Wonder – and went inside.

I emerged 10 minutes later, carrying a clear plastic cup filled with orange-coloured slush, with one of those domes designed for people who like a massive swirl of cream on the top of their coffee and wish to transport it in its pristine state to their place of work.

When future historians look at these domes, they will laugh with horror at our decadent ways. “How soft our ancestors were,” they will say. “No wonder they could not defeat our alien overlords. All hail Zarg.”

I arrived at work and sighed. I was still wearing my sunglasses.

But I could not remove them, because I was carrying a bag, my electronic pass, my jacket – it was warm, remember – and my domed slush cup. I was going to look like an idiot because once again I had totally underestimated the number of hands I would need over the course of the day.

I approached the turnstile. I am not entirely sure why there is a turnstile. I can understand it at Alton Towers, but there is rarely a queue to get into work. I placed my pass against the sensor. It didn’t work. I tried again, with the same result.

I sighed more heavily and gave it a third go. There was a beep, and the light went green for a second, but it turned red before I had a chance to walk through. It was quite frustrating.

A plan presented itself. I walked right up to the turnstile, leant back, held the pass against the sensor, heard the beep, and pushed against the turnstile.

But the turnstile did not move. What I had done was walk into a crotch-height metal bar. “Ooyah!” I said, in a high-pitched voice, and I dropped my slush all over the electronic gubbins. “Aargh!” I said. Sighing somehow did not seem enough.

I had no paper towels with me, so I tried the turnstile again. This time it worked and I raced into the nearest toilet, passing at speed a man emerging. I can only imagine what he assumed.

I grabbed a toilet roll and rushed back out, hiding it under my jacket. Yes, I could have explained if called upon why I was running around the office with a toilet roll in my hand, but it would have taken some time, and I needed to get to the electronic gubbins before the slush melted.

As I wiped up the orange mess, a colleague passed with ease through the turnstile.

He looked at me and said, “Are you wearing shades indoors, Gary?”

I WAS out of town last week for complicated reasons. And for even more complicated reasons I had to stay over an extra night.

I had not anticipated the extra night when I packed my bag, which I came to regret. I won’t go into detail, but you know what the weather has been like. Frankly, it was a bit like Tenko for men.

Anyway, after a continental breakfast – European, it turned out – it was time for me to depart. I had some time to kill before my train, so I went for a wander through the centre of the town which I will not be naming. This is partly in order to introduce an element of mystique into my narrative, and partly so I am not sued for libel. I shall call it Boomtown.

The sun was bouncing off the various coffee shops and Tesco Expresses as I wandered through Boomtown. It was humid, like a steam room. Some confused people were dressed as if they were in a steam room, and the air shimmered in the heat, rendering many of the tattoos of these people hard to decipher.

Exhausted by the effort, I stopped at one of the coffee shops and ordered a tea, hoping to sit in an air-conditioned environment. I was handed the ingredients to make my own tea, as is the custom in these places. I still have no idea why this happens.

If you went into a cafe, ordered beans on toast, and were presented with a tin of Heinz, a can opener, a camping stove, a loaf of Warburton’s, and a toaster, you would be bewildered. But, as a tea-drinker, I am expected to assemble my own beverage. I am basically paying for the right to be the barista’s sub-contractor.

I also ordered a cinnamon apple fritter doughnut. I expected – correctly – it would be horrible, but I could not resist the pile-up of words, and I took the DIY tea and Frankencake for a tour around the shop until it became clear there were no free tables.

So I stumbled outside and cleared a table, and sat in the full glare of the sun with my very hot drink and disappointing pastry. This had all worked out very poorly.

Then I looked up. There was a church nearby and I had what I suppose you could call an epiphany. I realised it was what I had needed for so long. I was saved.

“Yes!” I thought. “Churches are always freezing!” I swallowed my tea and raced to the church. I stepped inside, the smell of incense mixed with polish dragging me back to my altar boy days, and I began to walk up the aisle, my footsteps echoing off the cold stone pillars and the ceiling as high as heaven. For the first time in days, I was cool.

That’s when he stepped in front of me, a man in his late sixties.

“Welcome to Boomtown Parish Church,” he said. “Lovely day, isn’t it? Is there anything you’d like to know?”

“I’ll say,” I thought, “I wonder if he knows why I had to make my own tea.” I had no other questions. I’d been in a church before, I knew which end was which.

“Anything at all?” he pressed me.

“Erm, when was the church built?” I asked. That seemed safe.

“A-ha! When do YOU think it was built?” he asked.

I didn’t have a clue. I haven’t got an MA in ecclesiastical architecture. All I could do was proffer a meaningless guess. “Erm, 1782?”

“Wrong!” he yelled. “Try again.”

“1783?”

“Wrong! Try again.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, suddenly aware of the time. “I don’t have the faintest idea.”

“It was 1890,” he said, triumphant. “Really?” said a woman who had joined us.

“Yes!” He leant in towards me. “I must say, you both speak English very well.”

“I am English!” I said. “Ah,” he said, pointing at the woman’s face. “But your wife is foreign.”

“I’m English too!” said the woman.

“She’s not my wife,” I said.

He gave me a disapproving look. “Partner, then,” he said. “Look at the window. How old do you think that is?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Have a guess . . .” he said. The woman who was not my wife sidled away. I didn’t blame her. There was no way I was going to be allowed to leave that church without knowing how old everything was. I was going to miss my train.

I waited till somebody else entered the church, then said I wanted to see the altar.

As he pounced on the fresh meat, I stepped away, and walked to the altar, watching until he was turned, the sweat dripping down my neck.

I am not saying that I was bent double using the pews as cover as I crept out of the church behind his back. That would make me look ridiculous.

I AM not at my best in this relentless heat. And my best is pretty small potatoes anyway, so you can imagine what a sub-par me is like.

This is not to say that the sunshine is entirely unwelcome. It is a relief, for example, to be able to walk the streets unafraid that I might develop a hole in my shoe and subsequently step in a puddle, which would lead me to have to visit a shoe shop and remove my shoe, revealing a hole in my sock.

I am not saying I have a hole in my sock, but if I were having the sort of day in which I developed one in my shoe and stepped in a puddle, I would definitely also have a hole in my sock.

Unfortunately, that is the only example which I can conjure. Heat is for other people – lithe, tanned people, swathed in white linen and sunglasses, and who can eat prawns properly. Heat is not for the likes of me – pale, Irish-looking people who suit jumpers, and who have skin the colour and thickness of uncooked filo pastry. You might as well drop me into the core of a nuclear reactor.

My condition is exacerbated by two factors. The first is that I work in an office in which I am expected to wear a suit. Yes, sometimes I rebel and wear a tweed jacket, but I am not exactly Che Guevara. I cannot turn up for work in my pants – not even on Dress Down Friday – comfortable as that may be. Not after the memo.

The closest I can get to that level of comfort is by opening one more button on my shirt than usual, which does serve to keep me a little cooler, but carries a certain risk, namely that I look as if I am a chunky gold bracelet away from a medallion.

The second factor is that I travel to work on a bus. I do not know if you can imagine the discomfort of a bus in this weather, but try this experiment . . .

Take a large biscuit tin and empty it of biscuits. Put the tin out in the midday sun. After an hour, use a bradawl or drill to pierce two opposite sides of the tin half a dozen times.

Then fill the tin with 56 hamsters and whack the lid back on. Leave for 20 minutes – perhaps you can use this time to eat some of the biscuits you removed, as there’s no way you’re going to want to put them back – then take the lid off.

There will be a rabble, with one hamster wearing glasses and hogging one of the holes. That one is me, desperately trying to breathe some new air.

For, owing to some esoteric newspaper production changes, and the regulation of the local transport authority, I now get the bus at the same time as the last generation to shun deodorants as a dangerous European fancy.

Normally this presents few difficulties, but in the current climate I require a gas mask and shots to get through a bus journey intact.

And even that is not enough.

I was travelling home the other night. The treacly heat was repelling any attempts by the river to introduce a cool breeze, and I boarded the bus coated in a light film of what I can only describe as sweat.

I sat in one of the backward-facing seats, my face slightly glistening.

And another man sat next to me, a younger, tattooed man, part of the Lynx generation. But perhaps he had been off when his class had learnt about personal hygiene as he had the oniony smell of a man who has eschewed a roll-on.

I placed my cheek against the cool window and hoped for a quick death. And then a young woman sat opposite me, speaking on her mobile phone to her mother, I assumed, given the gynaecological frankness of her discussion.

I saw her nose twitch, like that of one of your 56 hamsters, and a look of distaste crossed her face. She had clearly picked up the pungent whiff of Onion Pits.

“Oh, yeah, that reminds me,” she said, looking straight at me. “We need some more deodorant.” Then she stood up and went to sit farther down the bus.

I have never been so insulted in my life, and I have been insulted much more than most people.

If the young woman on the bus is reading this, I have two things to say to her.

One, I have two showers a day at the moment, and shares in Right Guard. You could eat your dinner off me, though I’d very much prefer it if you didn’t, especially if it had just come out of the oven, or had gravy.

And two, you definitely need to get that thing looked at.

I HAVE a complicated relationship with sleep. Do not get me wrong, I am generally all for it and think it’s an excellent idea.

But what I have found recently, I expect owing to my advancing years, is that when I want to sleep, for example in meetings, I am not allowed to; and when I am allowed to sleep, for example at bedtime, I do not want to.

Some would call it insomnia. I would call it downright stupidity. After all, my brain and my body have known each other for quite a few years now. It is about time they came to some arrangement.

For this is how the evening conversation between my brain and body goes…

BODY: Goodness me, brain, I’ve been on the go for 16 hours. I say, “on the go.” What I mean is I’ve sat at a computer and on a bus for, well, 11 hours. I’ve sat in front of the telly, made a few cups of tea. I don’t know, it all adds up, probably. I’m not a brain so maths is not my strong suit. Shall we go to bed?
BRAIN: Yeah, you are tired, aren’t you? Trouble is, I’m not quite ready. I’ve got to finish writing this thing. Also, I’m watching telly and want to see if the loud man can eat half a bull minced up into burgers, with 97,000 jalapenos, and a Shetland pony-sized lump of that cheese the Americans have. You’ll just have to wait. Tell you what, I’ll let you have a yawn.
BODY: Yeah, thanks for nothing.
Later…
BRAIN: I am amazed that man is still alive. Right, let’s go to bed. I’m ready to shut down for the night. Body? Body? Are you asleep?
BODY: Leave me alone.
BRAIN: But I thought you wanted to go to bed.
BODY: I do want to go to bed, but I can’t face the admin.

And so the two argue for another 20 minutes until the brain somehow forces the body off the sofa and drags it up the stairs, after making it do all the socket checking and cup washing.

It would all be simpler if I could actually sleepwalk.

I know that sufferers of somnambulance say it is not a laughing matter, but, to be fair, sometimes it is. Especially if you have the likes of, I don’t know, Popeye or Harold Lloyd six steps ahead of you ensuring you don’t fall down manholes, or plummet from the high steel of a skyscraper construction site.

But I am not a sleepwalker. I have only sleepwalked once in my life and it went quite badly, so I have dismissed it as an option.

I was 13 years old – second year seniors in old money, year 8 these days – and on my way back from a French day trip to Boulogne-sur-Mer.

We had left at 10pm the previous night, with the assumption that we would sleep on the coach on the way to Dover.

This assumption was made by somebody who had never travelled on a coach with 60 teenage boys.

However the excitement of visiting a foreign country for the first time and asking for an Orangina in French – “Un Orangina, erm, por favor” – carried me through the day.

And it was only on the coach on the way back I felt myself drift off…

I woke in a very cramped, if brightly-lit, toilet. I had no idea how the lock worked and banged on the door, shouting “Let me out!” A teacher talked me through the difficult process of sliding a bolt to the left and I emerged to hoots from 59 teenage boys.

I thought it was something of an overreaction, but back at my seat, I was told what had happened.

I had leapt to my feet and shouted: “We’re late for school!” Then I had apparently attempted to wake my brother. My brother was not there.

In fact, I had gripped the throat of the boy in front of me and throttled him in order to “wake him up.”

Then I had stumbled up and down the aisle of the coach about half a dozen times crying out, “Mummy! Where’s the toilet? I need a wee-wee,” before finally being diverted into the lavatory by one of the teachers.

I am sure there might be worse audiences in front of which I might have performed this impromptu act of theatre than a group of 59 teenage peers, but I cannot think of any.

Perhaps I should sleep on it.

I STOOD in front of the chiller cabinet and sighed. I wanted a carbonated beverage, but there was far too much choice. How was I supposed to decide between the people’s names printed on the side of the bottles?

Obviously it is a marketing ploy – and to some extent it’s worked because here I am devoting space on the media outlet of your choice to talking about it – but the motive behind it baffles me.

For all I can see is that it divides the fizzy pop company’s customers in an unnecessary way. For there are three types of people in this world.

Firstly, there are the people who just pick up a bottle and walk away, giving the matter of the name printed on the side no thought at all.

These are the worst people in the world. These are the people who don’t care which government is in power “because they’re all the same”.

The people who don’t have books in their houses.

The people who will sit in the seat above the driver on the bus just because it was the first seat they saw when they walked upstairs, and for no other reason.

Secondly, there are the people who will look for a specific name among the bottles in the chiller cabinet and if they do not find it will go to another shop and another, until they find the elusive bottle with the name Veruca on it.

These people are mostly harmless – and at least they care – but I don’t think I’d like to be stuck next to them at a parents’ evening, or paired up with them in an ice-breaking session at the beginning of a seminar in Harrogate.

Thirdly, there are the people who don’t want the people around them to judge them, based on the name they choose.

Those who will look for the most neutral name they can find to avoid revealing their social class or anything else about themselves.
People who would die if they believed strangers in a Tesco Express thought they knew somebody called Jayde-Marie, Kyle or Hilary.

They are the best, most well-adjusted, and, I have to say, most sexually attractive sort of people.

I am happy to admit I am in Category 3.

But it seems to me that there is a reduced likelihood that people in the second and third camps will buy a bottle of the manufacturer’s fizzy pop on a specific occasion, because they cannot find a suitable name.

And that was the position in which I found myself at the chiller cabinet. I didn’t fancy any of the names presented to me. I looked hard, trying to find a Michael or a Claire, the sort of name which, if you said you’d given it to your child, would make normal people think, “Ah, that’s nice”, and not, “Good grief, that child will be an adult one day and walking around with that name. This is a borderline social services job”.

But I could not see a decent, unremarkable name among the bottles.

And then I became aware of the people standing just behind me.

They were waiting for me to make my decision. And I was paralysed. I had been there too long. If I picked a bottle at random, the people behind me would assume I were a Category 2 customer who had been specifically looking for that bottle, like an Eddie Stobart lorry spotter.

I would be judged as wanting on several levels. What could I do , , , ?

It occurred to me afterwards that there could be only one reason for the frankly destructive naming of bottles. And this is it . . .

A 7am MEETING BETWEEN THE MD OF THE SMASHING BEVERAGE Co. AND FIGGIS AT AN AIRCRAFT HANGAR SOMEWHERE IN THE SOUTH-EAST OF ENGLAND.
MD: Figgis, we’re getting out of the fizzy drink game.
FIGGIS: But why?
MD: They’re awful for teeth. I heard only last week that a man in his early 40s broke an actual molar on a soft onion ring.
FIGGIS: That’s ridiculous and also pathetic.
MD: Nevertheless, we have to shut down production.
FIGGIS: We can’t! We have contracts with the bottling plants. We’ll be ruined.
MD: Gah! All right, then we must make people much less inclined to drink our beverages of doom. Ideas?
FIGGIS: How about we print names on the sides of bottles, and use people’s own inherent prejudices to prevent them from buying individual bottles?
MD: Brilliant. Get to it.
FIGGIS: Just one question – why are we meeting in a hangar at 7am?
MD: Been watching The Apprentice, innit?

Back at the chiller cabinet, I found the solution. I scrabbled among the bottles and found one labelled “Drink with friends”.

I walked away, well aware that the people behind me were thinking: “Friends? A likely story.”

I APPEAR to have a lot of difficulty with food with holes in it, probably because it is the work of the devil.

People in my house still complain about the smell of the cheese on toast I made with gruyere, which, to be fair, lingered for about two haircuts (the length of time between haircuts is how I measure my life these days).

And a few months ago I had some trouble with a mystery doughnut which had been impaled on the handle of my front door and which heralded a long sequence of progressively odder items being deposited outside my house. This led me to sit in my car on a cold autumn night and stake out my own house in a doomed attempt to identify the culprit.

But food with holes in it had never done me any physical harm . . . until last Saturday night.

I had been to see the dark reimagining of Superman at The Pictures – no red underpants, grits his teeth a lot, 7/10 – and was ready for something to eat. After all, I had just sat through a 2½-hour film and half an hour of trailers, advertisements, and passive aggressive anti-downloading public information films. I could have gone to London in that time.

So I took my young sidekick/going-to-the-pictures alibi to a fast food burger chain. I won’t name the chain, but, let’s face it, there are only two. I chose a burger which had barbecue sauce and two onion rings on it, because I was in the mood for something outré and exotic.

I carried the tray over to a table, we sat down, and I attempted to pick up my container of French fries without depositing half of them over the tray. Absent-mindedly, I bit into an onion ring . . .

“Clunk” went the onion ring. “Clunk?” I thought. “That doesn’t sound right. Onion rings don’t make a clunk noise. They don’t make any noise. Incidentally, what’s that very hard thing I can feel in my mouth? Oh, flip . . .”

I had broken a molar on an onion ring, by far the most pathetic thing on which anybody has ever broken a molar. I can understand pork crackling, toffee, even a Toblerone – especially a Toblerone – but a soft onion ring in soggy batter? It is the dental trauma equivalent of being mugged by Miss Tibbs from Fawlty Towers.

I should explain in mitigation that I lost a filling in the tooth a few months ago and I had not got round to getting it fixed because it was not bothering me enough to make me register with a dentist. And I was not registered with a dentist because my old dentist had de-listed me for missing two appointments.

So the tooth was weaker than normal. But an onion ring?!

Anyway, it turns out that the very worst time to break a tooth is about 7.13pm on a Saturday, but luckily I was able to get an appointment at an emergency dental unit on Sunday morning.

After a night of testing the limits of prescription painkillers, I sat in the dentist’s chair. He was really annoyed, and told me to sit in the patient’s chair. I explained my predicament and outlined my mitigating circumstances. I don’t know what I was expecting – congratulations for leaving my tooth unfilled for so long? Maybe a “brave soldier” sticker?

Instead, he told me off for not having the work done, slapped a bit of putty in my crumbled tooth, and said I must register with a dentist sharpish before the putty fell out.

With uncharacteristic luck, I have managed to register with an NHS dentist, so it won’t cost me a fortune to get the necessary work done.

But I know in other parts of the country dental practices willing to take on new NHS patients are rarer than Channel 5 BAFTA awards.

I cannot help feeling the current dental service in the UK is the template for the future NHS, and it scares me.

I see a bare minimum provision for emergencies and for the very poor, subsidised treatment for postcode lottery winners, and a gleaming private sector for the rich.

And I see lots of people like me a week ago, leaving chronic conditions untreated until it’s too late because it’s too costly or too much hassle to obtain treatment.

I see a National Health Service with an ever-widening hole in it.

In the meantime, I am staying well away from bagels and Polo mints. Those things are dangerous.

THE letter I had been dreading arrived. It is true what they say, you cannot run forever. Although if I ever did a marathon, I suspect there would be a single man in a hi-vis tabard sweeping away plastic cups as I crossed the line.

I opened it, and my worst fears were realised. The sods wanted me to have a new picture taken for my driving licence.

I do not like having my picture taken, and if I do have my picture taken I insist on full editorial control. I don’t exactly have a best side, but I definitely have a worst.

Also, I have a roving eye. This is not in the vigorously-heterosexual-Cliff-Richard sense, as detailed in the frankly creepy song Living Doll, though I am as capable as any man of enjoying the for-the-dads combo of Susanna and Carol-with-the-weather on the breakfast news.

Rather, because of an operation on an inward-turning squint when I was a small child, I now have, when I am tired or not concentrating properly, the wall-eyed look of a character from The Simpsons.
This means that when I am photographed full on I am at risk of looking as if I am pulling a very difficult face.

That would be fine if I were the only person ever to see the photograph on my driving licence, but what if I went on the run after being accused of a crime I did not commit?

Look at what Harrison Ford had to go through in The Fugitive. Was it not bad enough that he had been wrongfully accused of killing his wife and had to go on the run while trying to prove his innocence? Imagine how much worse it would have been if in the only picture the newspapers had of him his two eyes looked as if they had had an argument and were no longer speaking.

With a sackful of gloomy forbearance, I filled in the form, trudged to the post office, and asked the nice lady to take my picture.

She led me into a sort of photo booth. But this was not the sort of photo booth you see in montages of people falling in love in really bad films. This was the sort of photo booth they would have had in Soviet Russia if there’d been digital photography in those days.

I pulled the curtain closed. “Stand on the spot and look at the red light,” she said. I did as she said. As I did, I saw my face appear on a screen below the red light. “Argh,” I thought. “My eye is doing that thing.”

Flash! “You’re not looking at the red light,” said the woman. “Look at the red light.”

I stared at the red light again. But I could see my face again, with my big fat stupid Homer Simpson eyes. I think I shuddered.

Flash! “Look, just keep still and look at the red light. Just the red light. Don’t look at the screen. Look at the red light,” said the woman. I did.

Flash! “Right, OK,” said the woman. “Is that it?” I asked. “Yes, you can get out of the booth now. You need to open the curtain.”

“What?” I thought. “How else have people been getting out? Did somebody actually crawl under the curtain? I am worried that somebody who doesn’t know how to operate a curtain is allowed to drive a car.”

The licence appeared a day or two ago. The picture’s OK. I’m not going to trouble the homepage of drivinglicencehotties.com, but I’ve decided I can live with it.

This was mostly because of a picture I saw the day before, of a woman whose face I had not seen for many years.

For a couple of years, around the time of my eye operation, my family lived with my uncle and auntie. My auntie had a close friend called Janice. Consequently I saw her a lot, and played with her son, who was the same age as me. I was very fond of Janice.

A few years later she was dead, claimed by cancer at 27. She was the first person I knew who had died. Over the years my memory of her has faded, with just little fragments and a sense of affection left behind. I couldn’t make a proper picture of her face appear in my mind’s eye. I recalled her as beautiful, but I couldn’t be sure that she hadn’t been romanticised, as those gone too soon usually are.

Then at the weekend I was shown a photo her son had found and sent to my auntie of Janice, sitting with my auntie in a bar.

It unlocked the memories straight away. I could see her standing in my uncle and auntie’s living room, with Tina Charles playing on the stereo.

And maybe one day, somebody will see that driving licence with the stupid wall-eyed picture and be reminded of who I was.

Oh, and my impression was correct. She was beautiful.

But I bet she hated that photo.