To recap.

Tip No One was be outside before breakfast. More accurately, before eight am.

I got this (more or less) from a Sleep Consultant.

(Have you ever wondered why “consultants” get loads more money than the rest of us? Or, indeed, what on earth a “consultant” is? Our son-in-law is a “consultant” and I still haven’t a clue… I sometimes get described as a “broadcaster”, which is even more meaningless and which, as far as I can make out, simply means you’ve occasionally been shoved in front of a microphone. Though not quite as meaningless as “religious commentator” which means absolutely nothing at all.)

Anyway, it’s all to do with Serotonin, Melatonin, Melania, all that kind of thing. (We don’t need to get too scientific about it, given that the Pres of the US can cure an international pandemic by gargling bleach. I don’t know why these Oxford chappies are putting in so much work, staying up all night, when it’s so simple.)

Or, in fact, blinding common sense.

Go outside as soon as you wake and it’s daylight, both, and your body goes, oh, right: I know this one. Daytime, yes? Then, come nighttime, it looks at the stars and says, yeah, got it: this is the other one.

Whereupon you sleep like a baby.

(As long as you haven’t been Messing About With Screens, of course.)

Not like a modern baby that wants to do jigsaws and discuss Nietzsche all night, but a decent old-fashioned baby that you put in its cot at 6pm and it doesn’t wake up until 8 the next morning. All ready for its bacon-and-eggs and fully potty-trained.

So that was our Really Irritating Cheerfulness Tip No One.

You’ll be pleased to hear that Tip No Two is considerably more irritating.

A few weeks ago, when such innocent pleasures were not capital offences punishable with another six years of lockdown, we were having supper with friends. Two of us and two of them. One of whom I was at school with in a different era altogether when more than six girls were allowed to go to the same school and sit in the same classroom.

And she happened to say she’d run “5k” that morning and felt rather pleased with herself.

Now, I’ve always been lousy at running. Even when I was a slip of a thing in gym culottes and actually quite sporty, I always came last at running. No idea why. I could play hockey, ride a pony, serve at tennis, score in rounders and swim for a very long time indeed… but not run.

Later in life I cultivated a loathing of anyone zipping round the park with wires in her ears puffing and pounding. Poor thing, I would think. You’re causing yourself joint-wreckage, heart-attack, misery and depression, when you could be wrapped up in a thick woollen coat like me enjoying a lovely walk with a dog and admiring the rusty leaves against the cobalt sky.

So when my friend told me this, my first reaction was to say, how ghastly, in sympathy, except I thought it might be a tad rude.

And then it occurred to me that perhaps she had actually chosen to do this.

And that, instead of wishing she could sink her feet in concrete so she was never tempted to again, she had actually said it made her feel good.

And then I reflected that, if we’d once been at school together, perhaps what she considered possible might not be out of the question impossible for me, too.

I’m not quite sure exactly when the penny dropped or why, but the final breakthrough in this realisation was that, as a student, I had gone round Christ Church Meadows every morning before college breakfast, and I must presumably have done that voluntarily.

And the only reason I stopped was because one morning I did so with Shaun, before we were even engaged, and he was so utterly scornful and dismissive of the pace at which I didn’t go – saying he could barely go so slowly if he ran backwards, and didn’t I know I had to raise my pulse to do any good at all – that the next time I did as he said and when I finally stopped thought I’d killed myself.

Shaun was a Centre Forward and not so much fast, as disappeared.

Oddly perhaps, instead of telling him to jump in the Isis and never speak to me again, I instead accepted his offer of marriage and never ran again.

Until a few weeks ago.

As if in a trance the next morning, after unearthing the trainers I’d wanted to chuck years ago, I left the house in the direction of the park at a humble little trot along the pavement. Which only lasted until the next pavement before I was heaving huge sobs into my lungs and doing what my mother called Scouts’ Pace (you run until you can’t, then walk until you can again) and by the time I reached the park and started trotting round that I realised I was, quite involuntarily, smiling.

I could still see the cobalt sky. And the leaves spiralling down from the sun. And the trees waving on the horizon.

And I was smiling at these sights. My whole face suffused with delight at the glory of the morning.

Every morning.

(To be fair, I’m not sure I’ve noticed other joggers’ faces jerked into automatic grimaces of joy… but it’s what happens to me.)

Fast forward to now.

I don’t run fast. I never have.

I don’t run far. It would put me off.

But every morning, as soon as I’m properly awake and have got bored of the latest professional opinion on what we are or are not allowed to do at Christmas (which doesn’t take me long) I pull on a pair of old jeans and a thin tee shirt and leave the house at a run – or, let’s say, little jog – and come back ten minutes or so later, still at the same little jog.

And still smiling.