Oh, it was exquisite! The sentences tumbled along like clear water in a rushing mountain stream. The paragraphs built and built like something designed by an architect.

My wife was playing with our grandson Thomas in the conservatory and I heard her say: "Yes, go and get it; it's in the drawer in the unit behind where Grandad always sits."

Where Grandad always sits. The rushing stream stopped mid flow. The architect folded up his plans and moved on to another job.

I got up and went into the conservatory. "What do you mean, Where Grandad always sits?" I asked, my voice slightly louder than was absolutely necessary, especially in the sonorous conservatory. Thomas looked slightly worried.

"Well, that's where you always sit, so that's why I said 'Where Grandad always sits'," she said, with cast-iron logic. I was staggered, but I knew it was true. I was turning into one of those men who has a chair. Grandad's chair. Don't sit there, it's Grandad's chair. Grandad! There's somebody in your chair!

It's true that I always sit on the chair I'm sitting on now when I'm writing, but there are reasons for this. Very good reasons. The table's a nice height for laptop-pounding. It's near a power point in case the battery's low. It's near the printer in case I need to print anything. I'm facing the door because that's what Pa Cartwright always did in Bonanza; he did it because, as he explained to Hoss: "You've always got the advantage over the guy in the black hat with the silver gun."

The last man to come into our house wearing a black hat was our son Andrew and he didn't have a silver gun, but one out of two ain't bad, as Pa Cartwright also said later in the same episode.

In the past I've always been pretty contemptuous of people who have their own chair. I've been to schools where I've been warned of sitting in certain chairs in staffrooms because Mrs X has sat there since before decimal currency. When I used to catch the X19 bus to Doncaster regularly I was amazed at the bloke who always sat at the front left on the top deck, always.

My dear old dad, disabled by a stroke, spent the last few years of
his life sitting in the one chair, until he became part of the view of the room when I walked in. And then I remembered that when Thomas was little, his mum would tell me that when he was carried into the house he'd glance across to my seat at the table to see if I was in. I'm part of the view of the room and I haven't had a stroke!

I decided to change. I decided that sitting in the same chair all
the time was a sign that you were rusting and atrophying and
becoming part of the chair you sat in. So I took the laptop into the garden and sat on the wooden chair and looked out at the lawn.

I'd got plenty of battery, so I didn't need a plug. I was young enough to sit in a new seat. It felt odd. The garden table was slightly higher
than the kitchen table so the angle felt wrong. Instead of a ceiling above me I had the sky, and instead of walls I had hedges.

Still, I powered up the laptop andset to work. Or I tried to. The sun reflected on the screen so I couldn't see a thing or, worse, I could see my own concerned and unshaven face staring back at me.
I tried moving a little. I tried adjusting the parasol in the middle of the table. I tried shielding my eyes. Nothing worked. I took the laptop right down to the far end of the garden, in the shade of the big tree in the cemetery behind the house, but still the light stopped me seeing the screen.

I went back in the house. I tried to sit in the front room, but the temptation to switch the telly on was too much.

I tried to sit in the conservatory, but one chair is very low, so it was like eating your dinner on a tray rather than writing, and one chair was a rocking chair, so it was like writing on a boat at sea.

I went back to the table and tried to sit at different parts of it but I felt like a bit of a jigsaw that didn't quite fit. Back to the door: Pa Cartwright wouldn't approve. Sideways on: too near the wall.

So that's why I'm writing this in my usual seat. Grandad's chair.
Chair Sweet Chair. And the sentences are flowing like a mountain stream, I hope you'll agree.