And the evidence that time is flying is the fact that today is my
little grandson Thomas's fourth birthday.

Four years! I remember when he was born, that snowy day in November when I couldn't hold back the tears and I held him (not too tight, because I didn't want to break him) and I whispered to him: "Hello, grandson! Do you know what: we're going to have some fun!" And we have.

It changes you, being a grandad. You can fall asleep in the chair and it's okay because it's just grandad having a zizz. You can talk about the days before BBC2 and it's okay because it's just grandad living in his own little world. After all, how can there possibly have been a time before BBC2? When was that, then, in the days before the internal combustion engine?

You can get your son's old dinosaur books out and relive with your grandson the excitement of knowing that a compsognathus is different to
a triceratops; one is nippy and the size of a hen, and one is cumbersome and the size of a wardrobe and somehow when you're three (or 52) and just about to turn four (or approaching the path that leads gently towards the foothills of middle age) that kind of thing is important.

So now I can look forward, a long way forward, to when I'm an old
bloke and Thomas is a young man and maybe he'll take me out for a spin in his car (or hovercraft or space shuttle or whatever they'll have when he's a young man).

We'll zoom along through a Barnsley that's hardly recognisable and he'll say, "Hey, grandad, tell me about when you used to push me on the swing in the back garden" and my eyes will mist up with tears, because I'm a sentimental old fluff.

I'll tell him again the tale of how we used to go down the garden and I'd lift him into the swing (how light he felt, as though he'd fly out of the swing if he didn't hold on tight) and I'd start to push him and we'd sing his favourite songs like Jake the Peg and A Mouse Lived in a Windmill in Old Amsterdam and the one that I like to hope was his favourite, the one I made up about pushing him high in the sky.

The tune was usually different every time, and the words were often slightly different every time, but they went roughly like this:
"High as an aeroplane, high as the moon, high as a helicopter, high as
a balloon, high as a man on the roof, high as a bird on the wing, high as Thomas when he's swinging on his swing..."

We'd sing the song over and over as sometimes an aeroplane flew through the sky, and sometimes the moon was still out during the day (we talked about that: we decided that the moon must be tired, up all night every night) and sometimes a helicopter came low enough for us to wave at it,
and sometimes we saw the man that we called The Man in the Balloon, although he was actually a man in a buzzing microlite, and sometimes there was a man on the roof because we were having the extension done and Matt or Mick would be on the roof and we'd wave to them, and sometimes we'd just watch the birds turning and swooping over the house.

Once, Thomas fell asleep as I was pushing him, his little head lolling, but I carried on singing because I believe that even when you're asleep the words and the tune of a song that you hear can marinade in your head and make you the kind of person who loves music and who loves to sing.

I realise that by now the older Thomas will wish that he'd not taken his grandad out for a drive, because old Grandad Ian always gets very emotional at this point, always starts talking about the old times, sometimes slips back to that mythical time before BBC2, or before the wheel, whichever came first.

I don't mind if people find me emotional and sentimental, to be honest. Happy Birthday, Thomas. Keep swinging higher. Keep swinging as high as you can. Higher and higher until you're flying. And give your old grandad a wave as you pass by.