It has been something of a frustrating day.

Partly it has been frustrating because we have achieved nothing of any interest whatsoever.

It all started on something of a low note because having drunk a bottle of wine between us last night, we were both awake at two o’clock in the morning, and stayed that way for two hours, much to our irritation.

We looked this up afterwards and discovered that red wine does this to old people, which we certainly are. It starts off by sending you to sleep and then wakes you up after a few hours, with your heart pounding and your mind racing, leaving you wagging about restlessly, worrying about all sorts of pointless rubbish, which we certainly did. At half past three we were having a frowning conversation about the best way of curving the corners of the camper van bedroom ceiling without inconveniencing the cupboards.

When we thought about it this morning, it occurred to us that the whole of France actually functions on this very principle. They all drink red wine at lunchtime, fall asleep, and then wake up a couple of hours later, drink black coffee and then dash about enthusiastically until they can think of an excuse to slope off and have a rendezvous with their paramour. After that they go home, drink aperitifs, eat something and pass out.

It seemed to us an entirely sensible way of organising our lives and we salted the information away to put to good use when we retire.

We are not retired at the moment, and were not at all cheery when the alarm went off at eight o’clock.

It went off because we had to go and visit the optician.

You can’t have rubbish eyesight when you drive a taxi or operate precision oil rig machinery, and so we tootled off to the optician, which is just on the other side of the main road, to get our visual abilities thoroughly tested.

Apart from being half asleep we were both fine. It appears that night-time taxi driving actually improves your vision because it has got to work harder. It has not noticeably improved my ability to read in a dark taxi, however, nor to recognise forged twenty pound notes in the dark, and so I was obliged to order, at some massive cost, a couple of pairs of new reading glasses.

Mark wants some for welding and precision engineering, but the lady said she couldn’t do anything about that unless he knew exactly what he wanted, which he didn’t, so we will have to go away and look it up.

After that we dumped Mark’s taxi at the car valeter, because it was so dirty that I would have sooner eaten my taxi picnic out of the dogs’ basket than in Mark’s taxi, and then Mark went to the dentist whilst I cooked a massive shepherds’ pie which will feed us for the next week or so.

I had some time left afterwards, and I have been using it to investigate the Artificial Intelligence which lives inside my computer, and which I have hitherto been ignoring.

I asked it to design a motorhome.

It was a bit vague about that, so I had to explain a bit better.

After a while I had explained quite a lot, and it started to design things.

Really, some of the things it was creating were really quite astonishing.

I would not like to rely on it to do any actual designing, some of its ideas showed quite a surprising lack of comprehension, like putting the driver’s seat and steering wheel in the lavatory, and the kitchen sink next to the bed. It suggested a glass door on the bathroom and a shower over the top of the loo, the latter presumably as a time-saving exercise, and it only seemed to have the vaguest grasp of the rudiments of spelling and measuring things, but apart from that some of its pictures were beautiful, and one or two actually gave us some new ideas.

I don’t think I share the anxiety that it is going to take over the world at any time soon, and I most certainly would not let it drive a taxi, but it is very clever. Most astonishingly it seemed to have an intuitively good idea of what I might like, because its designs were coincidentally full of things that I have been looking at on Amazon, like gold sinks and blue velvet upholstery fabrics, almost as if it had been eavesdropping.

It was also very encouragingly flattering, telling me how clever and sensible I was every time I pointed out some inanity in its design ideas. I thought this was a master stroke, a machine programmed to reassure idiots of their brilliance will soon be the sort of thing everybody will want in their own home.

We have not been drinking wine tonight, but if we do wake up at two o’clock in the morning we will have plenty of new things to discuss, I can promise you.

I am impressed with AI.

It might catch on.