IT WAS early on a Saturday morning, the time of peace and dreaming, and my wife was curled on the sofa by a mug of steaming tea, nibbling the outer extremities on the corner of a Garibaldi biscuit, while reading her magazine – pausing occasionally to allow the significance of a particular item to settle on her thoughts.

Suddenly, her ruminations were broken.

“Gosh!” she called across the lounge to the armchair, where my fingernails and few surviving teeth were grappling in vain against a knot that had grown overnight on the lace of my left moccasin. I am a mono-tasker, unlike my multi-tasking wife. So, on hearing her exclamation, I raised my grizzled head, relieved to be temporarily free from that particular torment. “What did you say?” I asked. “It says here,” she continued, “that they have found a woman who is four million years old.”

“By Jove,” I responded. “You’d need a lot of puff to blow out her birthday candles. But I think I saw her on the telly a few nights ago – a squat but energetic representative of your gender, boasting alarmingly styled hair, muscular legs and vocal chords pitched to the rasp of emery paper. I’ve often seen her type in supermarkets, stalking pineapple chunks down the aisles.”

“Yes, she was on TV,” my wife concurred. “The anthropologists, palaeontologists and other experts think she could be the missing link between ape and man.”

“I wonder if they should continue their investigations in our shopping centre on Saturdays,” I said. “But we’re at cross-purposes here. The woman I saw on TV was singing one of her old hits, probably recorded in the same year that the serpent was sweet-talking Eve in the Garden of Eden. But all this talk of the missing link reminds me of Lower Bebington in the fall – a beauteous place, known to theologians, evolutionists and bone-sifters as the cradle of mankind.”