DO ASTRONAUTS, mid-bite of freeze-dried ice cream, look back at the pretty blue-green planet they were standing on only days earlier, and think: “Well, I never thought I’d be doing this”?

I ask because this is a thought that regularly appears in my mind, and I’m rarely in the middle of anything so exciting as floating in zero-gravity.

It happened again on Saturday night, as I looked down at my feet from between my uplifted arms and exclaimed: “I never thought I’d be doing an impression of a fortune telling fish.”

Unpractised and feeling a bit like I was in a community drama class, I had to admit it wasn’t a particularly good impression, and if my companions hadn’t been right in the middle of a conversation about fortune fish at the time then I don’t think they would have recognised it as one.

Eighties Christmases wouldn’t have been the same without those thin pieces of red acetate, shaped like a rudimentary haddock, which reacted to the warmth of your palm and curled up to reveal your personality.

In my house, we were all always “fickle”, year in, year out – that was, apparently, the only thing we weren’t fickle about.

Our fish never turned somersaults, though, which it turns out they would have done had we warmed our hands on the fire first.

The friend who revealed this top Christmas tip can’t remember what a loop-de-loop stood for on the list of movement-personality trait correlations that fell out of the same cracker as the fish.

But it was almost certainly something negative – they all were – and totally devoid of Christmas spirit.

Sadly, somebody in the cracker industry decided that it was time for an upgrade and starting filling them with things you might actually want to keep, such as tiny torches, interchangeable screwdrivers and sterling silver earrings.

Fortune telling fish fell by the wayside, along with non-magnifying magnifying glasses, plastic rings designed to cut off your circulation and tiny plastic frying pans with a sticker of a fried egg inside.

Perhaps it is down to the credit crunch, but I have heard tell of the return of the acetate fish.

A friend claims she found one when she pulled a cracker on Sunday night and, according to its wisdom, was decreed to be “jealous”.

For once the fish was accurate, because the friend had been ogling someone else’s rather more valuable cracker win.

If the good news is true, I shall be very relieved because Christmas is all about ritual, and checking whether I was still fickle was always one of mine.

This time of year is about doing the same things you did the year before and the year before that and, while in other parts of life this would be called “getting stuck in a rut”, in the festive season it’s called “tradition”, which is far more pleasant.

When I was little, my traditions included climbing the stairs to bed on Christmas Eve with a stocking and a candle, helping Mum make the brandy butter and wondering why there were crumbs stuck to Dad’s moustache after we’d left a mince pie out for Santa.

When I got a bit older, these were swapped for drinks in the Railway pub, in Formby, and smiling knowingly at the crumbs stuck to Dad’s moustache.

Now my parents have moved away from where I grew up and I have a house of my own, it’s time for new rituals – the best ones involving new members of the family who weren’t born when I was still singing Jingle Bells on the way up to bed.

Hopefully, the fortune fish will make a welcome return to tradition, but, should there be any confusion on this matter, the impression of it will not.

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