I’VE been feeling a bit depressed this week. It was raining when the alarm went off at a quarter past a stupid time on Thursday morning and the thought struck me that the nights are getting darker earlier already.

Yes, the longest day has come and gone and I can’t recall sitting out in the garden to eat my tea – OK dinner if you are posh.

Now, I’m certain that you’ve heard this many times but I’m sure that when I was a lad we never came in at all during the summer and it was still light at midnight! Well, maybe not that late but it did seem the summer evenings were longer.

Sorry, if that’s bought you down a notch as well. The brains trust at the Barmaid’s Bosom was in agreement with me, for once, but then they are a bunch of people who are still living in the 1960s and 70s and still see colour television as something radically new. We also wondered whether you can you still buy a black and white television licence because, of course, it used to be cheaper.

Electric Ted said he used to get a black and white licence because, in addition, in the old days you also had to have a licence for your dog. I was further depressed when next season’s non-league football fixtures came out this week.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the old game, but while putting the cricket fixtures in the diary shortens the winter, the footy and rugby games don’t do the same, do they?

I went to Ledbury this week, which is not unusual in itself as it is a splendid little town. By the old market hall is a cafe which I still refer to as the treacle tart cafe. It goes back to when my kids were nippers and they were taken there for a treat for a treacle tart.

I thought my grandson should be initiated in the family tradition, but to my surprise, there was no treacle tart at the treacle tart cafe. How could that be? It’s a bit like going to Cheddar and finding no cheese, or going to Brussels and not getting any sprouts.

Had a chuckle this week when the police issued a press release about a missing tortoise.

It reminded me of a true story of a few years ago when I was doing the Sunday Morning Show on BBC Hereford and Worcester.

We had a call from a listener to say they had lost their chameleon. We thought it was a wind-up but it appears it was not.

Now they are hard to find, of course, as they change colour to fit in with their surroundings. It’s a bit like the old Tommy Cooper gag: I went into Millets to buy some camouflage trousers and couldn’t see any!