IT WAS a high-reaching sky, wispy and bright, and, in the quiet reaches of the old garden, the sensitive soul could hear strange sounds celebrating summer’s warmth – the insistent step of the wood louse, scurrying between offices like a puffed- up Parliamentarian; the creaking joints of the daddy longlegs; the yawn of a young butterfly and the low, slow breathing of our snoozing rabbits, Millie and Molly.

But I didn’t need my ear trumpet to hear another noise inside the lounge of our house, where I was gabbing to a pal about the outrageous cost of cod, the growing menace of juvenile delinquency and the irresistible lure of Birkenhead as a holiday destination.

This unwelcome noise kept peeping through the eager hum of our conversation for a sly giggle before disappearing. Where was it? Had someone not clicked off the wireless properly, allowing it to pick up ghostly wheezes from a foreign land? Was it the burping gargle of water escaping from a half-blocked plughole? Could it have been the complaining hinges of a door in need of oil? Yet, this dark, bubbling rumble seemed to be coming from even closer – from, as it were, within.

You know, in the full richness of our stretching language, few utterances are more pathetic at an elegant dinner table than: "Was that me? Sorry".

Indeed, God was in impish mood when he designed the plumbing for the human tummy in such a way that you can’t always feel your own hissing and fizzing. "Be quiet," I whispered urgently to myself while reaching in my pocket for the tube containing those peppermint- permeated chalk tablets, which are meant to control stomach turbulence in a jiffy. How I cursed my lunch of bacon and lentil soup. Then, sucking discreetly on the tablet, I realised the noise had two sources.

My companion’s tummy was also in full orchestration. He must have rushed his steaming dish of leek and potato soup in the desire to be here on time, I thought. However, just as I was about to remark on the merits of pollock as a cheap alternative to cod, my own tummy let rip a particularly piercing note.