Today my tyre hit a kerb for the second time this week. What’s going on? It’s bad enough that I’m driving a Suzuki Swift granny car (even if I’ve zhoosed it up with a few accessories). Also, that note left on my car the other week haunts me each time I park. “Learn how to park,” it said.

Then I found myself browsing for ages in the temperature gauge section of the hardware store today. I was fascinated by digital devices which can tell you the temperature inside the house and out. I already look at the Met Service app on my phone most mornings before deciding what to wear. Am I becoming obsessed with the daily weather just to fill in the time that stretches before me into oblivion? I ended up buying a cheap thermometer with large numbers – suitable for elderly eyes.

My brother-in-law (who is not elderly) has a fascinating weather station which tells you everything you’d ever want to know including wind speed and rainfall – perhaps even phases of the moon. You just read the screen fixed on a wall inside the house.

I could be tempted to buy one of those old-fashioned weather houses where a little man comes out the door with an umbrella when it’s going to rain, and a little woman disappears inside. She comes out when it’s sunny – probably to hang out the washing. I don’t think they make those anymore. It would go well with our cuckoo clock. Speaking of kitsch, when I was a child Uncle Bob gave me a glittery poodle ornament which changed its sparkles with the weather: blue for rain, pink for sunshine. I loved it, but dust did for it in the end, sticking to the glittery bits so the weather was just overcast.

We have a couple of inherited barometers. I remember Dad tapping the one that hangs on the wall. Mum reads it from time to time. “The glass is rising,” she will say. “What does that mean?” I ask peering at it and wondering which hand you’re supposed to look at.

I’ve just gone hunting around the house for thermometers and found these:

The one on the right is, appropriately, beside a drawing of Shakespeare’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’. Perhaps, as the title of this post suggests, I’ll take up yodelling next – or, imagine this: a yodelling-blues fusion. It could work. Come to think of it, we’ve already experimented with both those genres at Singing for Pleasure on Thursdays at the WEA – where retirees go to keep their brains active.