I walked across our garden to the annexe this morning, then walked back. The journey took around twenty seconds, but my glasses were absent-mindedly on my head. When I pulled them back over my eyes two minutes later, I felt like a fish. Where clean lenses had been, there was now a film of water. It rained all yesterday evening, all through last night, and this morning it didn’t stop until noon. I was just in time to pick up the turkey: by the time I drove back, our local river was already overflowing onto the road. It’s probably closed by now.

My turkey butcher wins prizes every year for his wildfowl and beef, so by this time of a December, there’s a queue right round the block to pick up the Christmas meat. But not today: I walked straight in, picked up the bird, and walked out again. That’s as sure a sign of recession as you’ll ever see.

I have first friends and then family coming this year, so as the new generation got going last November 5th, I’ve reverted to the idea of a 1950s Christmas: tangerines, nuts, dates, turkey with all the trimmings, reinder hats, the whole banana. The grey drizzle adds perfectly to the theme: my main memories of that decade involve rain, soot, smog, and clothes drying above the back-to-back stove. But then, I was brought up in Manchester.

The 1960s were different. There were the Beatles, then great Tamla dance music, mods, then Flower Power, and finally, men on the Moon. It was hot on the day of the landing in 1969. I don’t mean on the Moon. The weather doesn’t change a lot on the Moon, because there isn’t any. It was just a hot week or so, and I sat until around 3 am to watch Neil Armstrong jump onto the surface and talk about a giant leap for mankind. The next day I went round to see my best friend Dave (also just back from University) and he told me that his kid sister had asked him at one point, “Who is this bloke Roger Houston?”

Kids are hysterically funny during that period when they don’t understand. My elder daughter (the one who just produced Lyla) remarked, when first she saw the sea, “Why is that big lake bumpy?”.

My younger offspring signed in from Australia this morning. She’ll spend the big day with her Mum and family plus sister, and then come over here shortly after Boxing Day. When she was six she asked me why it was called Boxing Day, and I told her it was to celebrate the end of goodwill to all men, and so they had boxing tournaments everywhere, as a sort of reversion therapy after all that smiling and laughing and being nice to folks you can’t stand. She thought it was really cool. “Will it be on the telly?” she asked, hungry for blood. Despite my odd sense of humour, she’s incredibly nice and well-balanced.

Nobody sells coloured light bulbs any more, have you noticed this? Probably what you’re struggling to remember is when you last bought a coloured lightbulb. It was – what? – around 1973, which is why nobody sells them any more. But I was trying to give our sitting room some mellow atmosphere for Christmas, and so I went to all the supermarkets, electrical stores and old-fashioned ironmongers in our area, but there were no coloured lightbulbs for sale. They’ve probably been banned by the Ecological Elf on the grounds of having a sulphur fingerprint or some other such tosh. Either that or the EU has decreed that, an experiment in Stuttgart having shown that rats exposed to blue lightbulbs for 400 hours non-stop become cancerously aggressive, it’s too big a risk to give their citizens the same opportunity.

Later in the afternoon, it started raining again. It’s 6.55 pm as I write, and the drizzle is still with us. One watches it draining into sewers, or away into the earth, and the recurrent truth dawns: that Britain is such an incompetent country these days, come next July the privatised water companies will be announcing more water shortages. The only thing required to stop this happening is a major investment in water collection, along with much-needed repairs to the existing system. But that’s not going to happen: it is a neocon certainty in theory, and a fantasy in practice.