I love weather. I just love it.

I particularly love English weather. Correction. British weather. Sorry: correction again. The weather of the blessed British Isles.

Because arguably, the weather I love most of all is that of Shaun’s very green and very pleasant – and very, very wet, which of course is why it’s so green and pleasant – Emerald homeland.

Years ago I organised for us an amazing family holiday in Ireland. To be honest, I’ve often organised amazing family hols in Ireland.

And one of the many wonderful things about that beautiful country, as well as the songs and lyrics and poetry and booze and craic and all the rest of Shaun’s heritage, is that the rain isn’t just capable of defying gravity horizontally, by 90º – as if God were practising his fly-fishing casts with rods of rain, right under your nose – but 180º. I swear, Irish rain can rain upwards from the ground to the sky. Through smiling sunshine, nothing! Irish rain can rain up through the floor of your horse-drawn caravan. With all the windows and the door shut.

It can rain through six foot stone walls of mediæval castles, no doubt.

Anyway, for this particular holiday, one of many, we embarked on what was known, and of whose fame we had heard years earlier, by the name of The Donegal Trail.

But first, let me tell you a bit about Atkins Family jaunts.

One of the first things to note about the Atks Fam generally, is its lack of dosh. So our annual summer break, presumably like many vicars’ families’, would either take place at our parents’ houses, or in pretty cottages very generously lent to us by kind parishioners or friends.

Until, in around the mid 1990s, when I started writing for various press publications, and hit upon a new kind of holiday.

Known in the trade as The Travel Article Holiday.

What this meant was that the author would 1. Spend several months beforehand persuading Travel Eds that what they needed most on their pages was a few photographs of the Atkins Family having fun. After which 2. The author’s family would go off and Have Fun. And finally, 3. That same author would come home and write it up.

I didn’t get paid much for it, as such. (If anything at all.) But in between steps 1. and 2. – step 1a. it were step – was for me to spend a load more hours and weeks contacting various holiday providers, airlines and so on, finding out what deal they could offer in exchange for the publicity this would generate for them. (You’d think it might be simpler just to get a real job and pay for it in the normal way. And you’d be right.)

For a family of six or eventually seven.

(This is all perfectly kosher, by the way. Next time you read a Travel Article, ask yourself whether the impoverished journalist, in exchange for a few hundred quid on a good day for writing the thing, honestly could have afforded to fly him- or herself to New Zealand and stay in all those swish mountain lodges and eat all those 5* dinners.)

There were a number of advantages to this wheeze.

One. I get to pitch the piece. So I get to decide what kind of holiday we get.

Two. Obviously, to catch the Ed’s eye, the idea has to be unusual, adventurous, whacky or lunatic in some way. And it just so happens that I love adventurous, unusual, whacky and particularly lunatic.

(I also love horses. An uncanny equestrian theme often ran coincidentally through these works of meticulous research.)

Three. The more things that go wrong on the holiday, the funnier and more entertaining the copy.

So the happier I am.

The observant among you may have spotted a trend, here.

You know how opposites attract? True, married couples, like dogs and masters, often end up resembling each other, yes. Eventually. Usually after several centuries of wedded bliss.

They don’t necessarily start that way.

I realised this on the first holiday we could actually afford after I started writing for the Telegraph, years ago, when we accepted a friend’s 40th birthday party invitation in Istanbul.

I say afford. The other guests all stayed in the top ex-pat Edwardian plush hotel in the City of Seven Hills, with sweeping staircases and deep red carpets. We could just about afford to stowaway in the back of a lorry and put up in the nastiest, tackiest, greasiest, most cockroach-ridden dive to be found in a dark back alley.

So that first night, Friday, we got back from dancing on the tables with the rest of the party at around midnight, to find our bags thrown into the middle of the rubbish-strewn urine-smelling street, the proprietor shouting in furious Turkish at the top of his voice at everyone who would give him the time of night, our passports confiscated if not actually already sold on, and no one on hand to translate this bizarrely unfolding scene.

I was so incapacitated with hooting delight at such a terrific opportunity for a good story (even though I wasn’t commissioned, on that occasion, to write it up on my return) that it was a while before I straightened up and caught sight of Shaun’s face.

He was suffering from a massive shortage of what they call, on dating sites, SoH. He didn’t seem able to see the funny side at all.

Where Will We Sleep?

How Will We Get Our Passports Back?

Will We Be Able To Return Home On Monday? (Or Ever?)

Seemed all that was going through his mind.

Not a thought to the wonderful anecdote this was going to prove at the party tomorrow night and indeed for ever after.

That must have been the moment when I realised that, though we had fallen head over heels in love with one another decades before and indeed were doubtless still in the same blissful besotted state, we were nonetheless Completely Incompatible.

Anyway, roll forward a few years and that time in Ireland I was telling you about – one of many – in which weather paid so large a part.

Actually, blow it, it’s nearly lunchtime.

I’ll continue the story tomorrow…