I didn’t push any buttons.

It didn’t work out like that at all.

In fact I was woken up at five with shocking indigestion. This was caused by my digestive system taking its revenge for the self-indulgent dinner of the previous night, being slow-cooked lamb, Christmas cake and home made ice cream, several handfuls of chocolates and a very large gin and tonic.

I am now about half a stone heavier and not very well.

It was so nice that it was almost worth it.

Anyway, I fidgeted and grumbled and sighed and twitched until at about half past six Mark got up and made some coffee.

We sat in bed drinking coffee for ages, and after a while Mark made a second pot.

We have never done that before, it is one of the idlest things I can imagine.

We sat in bed drinking our second pot of coffee, until eventually it was after nine o’clock and we had no excuse for loafing about any longer.

I took the dogs out over the fell and Mark went off to the shed, where he is fixing his car and the camper van alternately, depending on his mood, on the principle that a change is as good as a rest.

I am sorry to say that it was not a joyful walk over the fell. The weather was, and still is, entirely horrible, alternately grim combination of swirling, icy rain and a biting wind, and my indigestion had not subsided, despite handfuls of Gaviscon consumed for breakfast.

I got back to discover that I had forgotten that today was the day of an online Cambridge lecture that we very much wanted to hear, about the search for dark matter. Of course I am far too thick to understand a single, solitary thing about dark matter, but lots of people at Cambridge are not, and it is magnificent to have the opportunity to listen to them expounding on the subject.

I rang Mark, and he shoved the wheels back on his car in a hurry and came rushing home.

We listened carefully to the dark matter lecture. It is probably on YouTube by now if anybody else is interested. Of course it was gripping, there is lots of this stuff but we don’t know anything about it, and even less about dark energy. They showed us pictures of photons bashing into one another to make Higgs-Bosons in the Large Hadron Collider and explained that dark matter is probably very light.

We nodded sagely and stupidly, a bit like Roger Poopy might if we were to attempt to explain what his birthday is and how its timing is calculated, and when it had finished we blinked at one another, a bit half-wittedly.

The telephone rang, and it was a lady from the oil industry wanting Mark to go offshore next week.

There has been no work for weeks and weeks, and we have been starting to feel a bit bleakly anxious about our finances.

Mark agreed instantly, and unexpected relief washed through us like the first mouthful of single malt by the fireside in a pub after a long and muddy hike.

We were suddenly exhausted.

We set an alarm for two hours’ time and collapsed into bed. When the alarm went off we turned it off and slept for another hour.

In the end we woke up, and Mark trudged off to the shed to carry on dismantling his car, and I washed pots and hung laundry and made everybody’s dinner.

There was still some lamb left but I was not tempted. The indigestion is still gurgling away, even now.

It was time to go out to work long before I got round to thinking about buttons, that is going to be tomorrow’s adventure.

It does not matter. Mark has got work coming in, yah boo sucks to Ed Miliband.

We will not starve now.