‘DO YOU know where we were 16m years ago,” asked our son, sitting at the kitchen table between wobbling hills of homework, as his cornflakes sighed in their bowl under the insistent press of flowing milk.

“Good heavens,” I thought to myself, “I can barely remember where I was yesterday.”

Confusion then settled on my brain like a heavy moss. Had he said 16 million or billion years ago? Birthdays are so hard to remember, as you grow old. Either way, it didn’t seem to matter much. It was a long time ago – somewhere between Sir Cliff Richard’s first hit and young Adam and that coquettish Eve blowing their dandelion clocks in the Garden of Eden.

I hesitated, desperately reaching for inspiration. Steam belched from the impatient kettle. Indeed, where were we 16 million (or billion) years ago? Was it Lower Bebington, I wondered, imagining chintz curtains, lush lawns, potting sheds and tea and buttered scones, but somehow it didn’t seem quite us. Then, a great pile of bricks loomed into my mind’s eyes followed by the word “Accrington”.

“Well,” I thought to myself, “we’ve suffered some misfortunes in the past, without ever being quite that unlucky.”

By then our son was spooning his cereal with the speed and enthusiasm of a boy who dreamed too long into the morning and was now rushing to arrive at school in a swirl of blazer, ruffled hair and scuffed shoes, before the sounding of that bell. But he still had time to repeat the question.

I confessed to not knowing where we had been all those years ago. “The Sahara Desert,” he replied, triumphantly, as he stuffed papers and books into his bag until its catch was as strained as a Chinese hod-carrier’s underpant elastic.

For a moment, I gaped. A picture was developing of my wife in a fur loin-cloth, prancing between the cacti and prodding the sand with her divining-rod, in the hope of striking water for a nice pot of Earl Grey tea – while I playfully wrestled with a sabre-toothed tiger in the nearby scrubland.

At that very moment, as if by telepathic communication, my wife sprang into the kitchen “Did Next have a branch in the Sahara Desert then?” she asked.

With sublime patience, our son shook his head. “You’re not taking this seriously,” he said.

He then started to explain how we had moved from the Sahara Desert to Birkenhead without recourse to an estate agency. Apparently the tectonic plates had been moving gradually, or something of the sort.

“Plates!” said my wife. “Are you sure? I think you’ll find they ate off the ground in those days.”

With that, the boy clicked the catch on his bag and headed for the cloak-room, shaking his head and whispering “mad, quite mad”.

My wife switched on the TV. “What’s on?” called our boy, emerging from the cloak-room with a pair of pumps. “It’s a programme about fossils,” She replied . . .

Now, I think you know what’s coming. But the pause lasted an eternity. Outside, monkeys had turned into men and Birkenhead had escaped from the Sahara Desert.

“Is Dad in it?” choked our son, finally, while packing his mouth with a handkerchief, as tears fountained from his eyes. Oh, how they laughed. The earth shook and windows trembled.

But there is truth in this. As you grow older, the passage of time quickens, but somehow you want to hold it back, to keep the day, to beg the sun not to slip away. But it goes just like all the others, high-tailing it into your own history, hidden there somewhere in the memory like a junk-shop, in which the old chairs and tables stand in patternless heaps, all the ruins and the smiles.

But when you are young and roarin’, you rip into each day, confident in your arrogance that the sun will rise again and again for you. But then you miss so much. Now that I have entered my 60s, savour life’s little moments – the brow-rinsing flavour of a Cox’s orange pippin, or the slight “puck” of a blackberry being freed from its stalk.

You think more freely, like the great camel-herder and wiseman of the Sahara. “Life has not been the same since we lost Birkenhead,” he says.

LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk