No, it's the breeze that's been getting to me, the constant and never-ending gusts that rattle the house from morning to night. Particularly at night. Particularly in the small windy hours.

I reckon this wind-irritation gene has been handed down to me by my dad; he was a sailor and he criss-crossed the seven seas and at least three oceans during a career of a couple of decades in the Navy.

Even when he was a landlubber, driving to work in Sheffield every day, he would lick his finger and point to the sky to test which way the wind was blowing.

To be honest, it didn't make a lot of difference to his daily commute in the old Ford Zephyr (which is in itself a kind of wind, of course) but it would have been very important to his balance and general wellbeing on the deck of the Zulu or the Ark Royal. I guess it was the difference between staying a healthy pink and turning a groaning green.

Although Darfield is almost as far from the briny as you can get, the wind still shifts my mood about like a weathervane.

I wake up and I can hear it rasping through the old trees in the cemetery at the back of our house, near the shed and overlooking our lovely garden.

My wife's awake, too. "I've no idea how those trees stay up," she says, and the sound of the groaning branches sounds like the sails of an old boat in a force eight.

I'm not sure how those trees stay up, either, and any alteration in the tone of arboreal moaning alerts me to a possible shed-splitting and garden-churning collapse.

The whizzing-in-the-rigging really irritates me, though. If I were a dog, it would make my hackles rise. If I were a turtle, it would make me retreat into my shell, grumbling in fluent turtle.

So I get up and go downstairs. Outside, the clouds are scuttling by like commuters dashing for a bus, and the trees are bending and straightening and bending and straightening. The bird table comes crashing to the ground, sending a flock of sparrows up into the air, chattering in noisy complaint.

Well, I guess you'd kick up a fuss if your table blew over when you were having a nice outdoor breakfast.

I decide that a nice big bowl of cereal is just the thing to calm the windy blues and I glug milk onto my flakes with abandon. And then I'm in trouble because I've used up all the milk. And I'm Mr Irritated because it's windy.

So I've got to go to the shop for some more. I put on my coat and scarf and hat and step into the sharp incisors of the gale.

I feel like that bloke in the bath in The Wizard of Oz who whizzes past Dorothy's house as the tornado hits. I'm not a skinny chap but I'm buffeted by the wind and my scarf flies out at right angles to my body. I can almost lean into the wind

I try it and the wind drops briefly and I almost fall over. Bloomin' wind! I almost shake my fist at it but then remind myself that I'm a pillar of the community in my 50s.

I walk down the road; those few words can't convey how the wind rises and falls and lifts and drops and rages and shouts and whispers and screams.

I screw my eyes shut because the wind's slapping them even though I'm wearing glasses. It's a cold wind straight from the Arctic and it's finding its way through my zips and buttons to my nooks and crannies and hidden corners; I hunch over and nose my way down to the shop.

At the shop, I buy the milk in an irritated way and I buy a newspaper in an irritated way. I know that buying the paper should fill you with joy, and normally it does, but I'm just wind-irritated. I step out of the shop and I do a foolish, foolish thing.

I decide to check Barnsley's position in the league after a couple of games that were played the night before. I know, I know. I know that I shouldn't be so stupid as to open a broadsheet newspaper when the wind is towards the serious end of the Beaufort Scale. I know, I know.

Picture the scene: the middle-aged man / the newspaper / the wind with a mind of its own. See the pages of the paper flying like giant birds away from the middle-aged man. Can you hear what he's shouting ? No, it's too windy. Far too windy.

Good job too, because the words are pretty gale force in their irritation, if you get my breezy drift.