Day the parcel man met Bradleee Wiggins

So, my wife’s away in Cleethorpes at her mother’s caravan with our grandson Thomas and I’m sitting in the conservatory reading some Italian poetry. If I was on an island, that island would be called Contentment. I’m wearing shorts, old socks and a baggy jumper so that I look like an extra from a film about French Resistance fighters in the Second World War.
By The Newsroom
Published 3rd Sep 2012, 07:00 BST

I’m looking at my wife’s sun hat which is sitting on top of the tumble drier. It’s a big straw number she bought in New England once when it was sunnier than we thought. It suits her and as I sit there in my shorts and baggy jumper and old socks I think ‘will it suit me?’ So I put my Italian poetry book down and put the hat on. It’s a bit too small for my massive head and it sits on my hair like, as they used to say round here, a pea on a drum. I leave it on and turn back to the Italian poetry. Ah, that Ungaretti! He was a bit of a lad.

I gaze at the bike by the window. It used to belong to one of our kids and my wife got it out of the shed the other day to see if Thomas wanted to ride it. I’m not much of a bike rider but I bet I could have a go at that little one. Not outside, you understand: just in here. In the conservatory. I’m still wearing the straw hat. I stand up and perch on the bike. It’s small and I’m big. I wobble round the conservatory once, twice. I’m like Bradley Wiggins, a bit.

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I suddenly have an idea: what if, just for a laugh, I could make some Bradley Wiggins-style sideburns to stick to the side of my head. Just for a laugh. On the small bike. In the straw hat. I have a think (rather than actually thinking, in the same way they say that old people ‘have a fall’, rather than falling) and get some string from the plastic bag we keep string and rubber bands in and drape it under the straw hat so that the string hangs, unevenly, down the sides of my head. I look a tiny bit like Bradley Wiggins. Or Goldilocks. Or a new children’s TV character, Steve Stringhead.

I convince myself that I look more like Bradley Wiggins than I actually do. I also convince myself that I need a song to tell the world, or at least the conservatory, that I’m Bradley Wiggins. You’re right: my wife’s been away too long. I’m still wearing the straw hat. I’m still on the child’s bike. I begin to sing, in an exaggeratedly high-pitched voice: ‘I’m Bradley Wiggins! I’m Bradley Wiggins! I’m on a little bike and I’m Bradley Wiggins!’ It helps that Bradley Wiggins is an inherently funny name. Apologies to the great athlete, but it is. I extend the ‘ee’ sound in Bradley so I’m singing ‘I’m Bradleeee Wiggins.’ I’m still wearing the hat. There’s string coming from the hat. I’m on a child’s bike. I’m singing in a high-pitched voice.

I need to alter my voice more. I get one of my wife’s gardening gloves and jam it into my mouth so that a couple of the fingers stick out. I cycle round in my straw hat with the string hanging down singing ‘I’m Bradleee Wiggins!’ in a muffled high-pitched voice with a gardening glove in my mouth. It’s at this moment the man with the parcel comes to the conservatory door.