"WETTING rain,” my late mother said, in tones still gently tickled by the tea-and-bun rooms of her Glasgow girlhood, as a thin net of drizzle veiled our pale faces – gloomily turned to the bright-eyed cars, which skimmed the kerb beneath the street lamp where we waited, hopping back and forth in clockwork rhythm, hoping the shop opposite would remain open.

“But heavy rain is even wetter,” I replied, with the certainty of youth.

“Och, noo,” she retorted. “Fine rain is the wettest wet. Everyone of experience knows that. You have so much to learn, David. You see, it’s a cunning rain, which tempts you to defy it, luring the unwary from their lairs. Then brash young chaps leave their homes without their coats or hats or brollies.”

At this point, she paused and puckered her chin in an emphatic manner to allow her words to sink in. A fresh zeal entered the rain. “Before the chaps have reached the end of the road, they rue their impetuosity. Next time, though, they will go out prepared,” she concluded, with the sagacity of someone who has added another verse to the Bible – the Parable of the Foolish Walkers from Birkenhead.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said, shuddering, as I felt the advance of damp on my skin. Back at home, wetness would again enter the conversation. We had an ancient claw-footed bath, of a depth sufficient to excite marine biologists.

At its far end stood two stout taps fitted with X-shaped handles, which frequently wedged so tightly that they could only be released with the aid of a spanner. The hot tap was piped to the furnaces of hell, from which the water bubbled, gushed, wheezed, coughed and spluttered, causing minor underground eruptions, until finally it steamed through the mouth.

“Not too much water now,” my mother would say, as I filled the bath. “Remember the thirsty people in the desert.”

Despite the incessant rain, parents seemed to think that, if you ran the taps for too long, you would be denying water to more deserving people in arid regions. A picture loomed into my view of pious Birkenhead missionaries heading off for the Sudan with buckets of water, as well as prayer books and pith helmets.

But nothing really changes. The amount of water our 12-year-old son uses to brush his teeth would fill several municipal reservoirs and leave enough to freshen the roses. His eye-raising responses are almost exactly the same as those that once came so readily to my own face.

Life’s a cycle. “You can only have the chocolate sponge and custard after you have finished all your sprouts,” says my wife, a hint of authority darkening the lovely turquoise of her eyes. “I want to see all those sprouts eaten up! I want a clean plate! Think of those poor starving people in Africa.”

I lift my fork in a determined manner so that I can drop a plump sprout into my upturned mouth, in the hope that it will pass into the digestive system without at any stage making contact with a taste-bud. “Not you!” she scolds. “You should be old enough to eat your greens without being told. I mean our son.”

Have you noticed that nice food is for eating, and nasty food is always for “eating up”? Anyway, a fine rain was falling when I left the railway station to see my friend, the Philosopher, waiting outside the old marble cafe. “You know,” he began, before buttering a slice of toast, while the chocolate flakes melted into his coffee.

“You know, the class system started when it was noticed that one man was good at carrying clods of earth and another man was good at thinking. It wasn’t long before the clod carrier was gardening for the thinker.”

“You have something there,” I said, taking my first sip of coffee.

“Yes,” he said. “The thinking class has always been served by the useful class. But now we have far too many thinkers and not enough clod-carriers. In the past, the doers were always in the majority. Now we have more thinkers and that’s the problem.”

“That’s a wetting rain,” I said on leaving the cafe. “Very wet,” the Philosopher said, raising the collar on his coat, having imparted his wisdom.

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