I am, as my mother will tell you, usually in tones of faint despair, a carbon copy of my late father.

I am bookish, impractical, quiet (“You never start a conversation!” says the woman who hasn’t had an unexpressed thought since 1946), essentially incomprehensible to her, just as he was, and her attachment to us both was and remains a bafflement to us all. But never more so than when it came to his and my love of going to the pub.

God, I love a pub. And like, I suspect, most pub lovers, my platonic ideal is largely that laid out in the Evening Standard by George Orwell 80 years ago almost to the day in his well-known paean to his perfect pub, The Moon Under the Water.

It was fictitious but almost apprehensible – he noted that he knew of pubs that comprised at least eight of his 10 main stipulations: Victorian architecture and fittings; games only played in the public bar; no radio or piano so that talking is possible; barmaids knowing regulars by name; a garden; snack and “a good lunch” on offer; draught stout; the right vessels for the right drink; selling tobacco, cigarettes, aspirins, stamps; and being “obliging about letting you use the telephone”.

Of course smoking in pubs is outlawed now (a rare modern improvement, I think, my motto being: “Live and let live as long as it doesn’t force other people to ingest your carcinogenic output”), and we all........

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