We are celebrating ten years of the Hooting Yard website between now and Christmas by reposting an item from each calendar year. This piece, entitled Three Blue Days Of Imbecilic Glee, appeared on Monday 13 December 2004.

The first blue day of imbecilic glee was a Tuesday towards the end of March. In truth, the day was not blue, for there was frightful storminess, a blizzard of hailstones, and much tempest and wrack. Nevertheless, when looking back, I remember other things. I remember how we laughed even though our picnic plans were dashed. I remember how we pretended the cow in the field was a Magus, bewitching us. I remember how we ran back to the house and spent the afternoon playing a game of Ayn Rand! Every time you shouted a sentence from The Fountainhead and I countered with one from Atlas Shrugged, the uproar was such that Mr Loog Oldham next door took off his big black boot and hammered on the wall. I remember the embers at the end of that first blue day.

The second blue day of imbecilic glee was that day we took our bicycles on the train to the fishing village at the end of the world and painted watercolours of the post office and bought stamps and drank Tizer and we were followed around the village by a one-eyed dog with terrible fangs and you wanted to take it home and all afternoon the shrill singing of the orphanage choir filled our ears and I found a tiny toy plastic pig in a thicket of stinging nettles and we cycled all the way home along that dangerous road as huge container lorries thundered past us in both directions.

The third blue day of imbecilic glee is today.