The turf: True sportsmen

I am sorry but if anybody else asks, ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’ they are in danger of me dotting them one. I arrived back with Mrs O. from two weeks lecturing abroad to discover that the neighbour to whom we had lent one house key could not find it. The builder holding the other hadn’t received our text asking him to hide it in a secret place. After two hours in a café there was no option but to burgle my own home through an upstairs window. It then took an hour’s negotiation to get the security firm to help me switch off the alarm deafening our neighbours while they insisted on me giving them a code number they had never supplied.

Mrs Oakley, a whirling dervish in the kitchen when needs must, then had a day in which to turn round a fortnight’s washing and make a Christmas cake, Christmas pudding, 50 mince pies and the turkey stuffing before a ten-hour drive for a family Christmas with our daughter on the Isle of Mull.