I recall a weekend visit a few years ago to a friend who lived at the time in Houghton‑on-the-Hill, Leicestershire. I shall call him Simon (it is his name, after all) and I had driven up with another friend, Pete, who lives in Romsey. Far be it from me to rubbish anyone but, with my hand on my heart, I could not swear that Simon is an incredibly competent driver with an unerring sense of direction.

When we arrived, we found he had arranged an evening rendezvous with another couple of friends at an establishment he insisted was called “The Ewes”. Knowing Simon, acting upon an educated hunch, and having confirmed my doubts as to the likelihood of the owners of “The Yews” naming their premises after some sheep, its location at nearby Great Glen was established. Or, as we subsequently discovered on our sojourns round the Leicestershire countryside (some being duplicated, to the extent that we began to recognise cows as old friends), it wasn’t.

The trip was not entirely without incident (well, we were with Simon): a man with no legs (driving an elaborate go-kart device with hand-operated pedals) was just one of three near misses, the other two being a man on a bicycle with all of his legs (only narrowly managing to retain them, no thanks to Simon) and a car, all of which, whilst on the face of it negotiating the highway in a perfectly legitimate manner, thoughtlessly arrived at a particular point a fraction of a second before they were about to negotiate a blind corner, and a fraction of a second after we had arrived at the same corner travelling in the opposite direction – still with me? Thank goodness for the open fields abutting the roadway. It’s all right, we didn’t frighten the cows, they knew us.

At one of several places where Simon decided that we may have been travelling in the wrong direction, he endeavoured to execute a rapid three-point turn, which probably ought to have been more correctly called a two-point-one-kerb-collision-point turn. It was a fairly high, robust kerb and I had seen it coming. Pete, in the back seat, however, had not, and was entirely unprepared for the not insignificant jolt. Only the layers of sandwich cases, pizza boxes, food bags and chocolate wrappers saved him from being severely injured.

However, after sheer perseverance, a soupçon of panic, and a fair amount of clever guesswork, we found The Yews. Life’s never boring.