”DO YOU know what I dreamt last night?” chimed my young wife, whose adorable head is fitted with an alarm clock.

The question had leapt from our billowing pillows on that early-rise morning – when the lazy angels yawned and the crawling sun met the plump moon in the same widow-black sky; and the first kettles hissed in the blinking lights from the towers of the city across the great river while my old teeth shoogled in their gums to the rhythm of ripe snores.

“Such heavy demands on the failing hinges of my intellect so soon,” I thought. A mattress spring pinged as I groped under the bed for the other alarm clock, whose hammer was starting to gong the bells in that rage of noise, which usually greets the day and scatters the local cats.

At my stage in life, you need a few moments to adjust to your surroundings. Had I been whisked away to Heaven, or was I still in its closest rival on the tourist trail, dear old Birkenhead?

“Don’t you want to know about my dream?” persisted my wife, who had launched herself from our bed to reach the wardrobe in three bounds. I began to open my mouth like a vicar on the brink of a prayer, but before I could speak, she was off.

“Well, I dreamt that I had lost my voice.”

“Good Lord”, I said. “Had you put it down somewhere silly, meaning to pick it up later? Did you report it to the police, just in case anyone else should find it? I did the same with hope, you know. I put it away carefully one night, ready for another time. But could I find it the next morning? I searched everywhere.”

“Be quiet,” scolded my wife, as irritation briefly deepened the lovely turquoise of her eyes. “You never take these things seriously. Everything is twisted into an excuse for one of your rambling soliloquies. It isn’t funny for a girl to lose her voice. I just didn’t know what to do.”

Indeed, it must have been a grievous loss, I mused, while remembering the phone call that she had made to wish Happy New Year to her sister, whose flow of words would suck the puff from the Oxford English Dictionary. By my measure, their conversation began with young Eve trying on fig leafs at Next’s branch in Paradise and ended with the first moon landing. Why hang up, when they could stay on the line until 2013? Two Hogmanays celebrated with one phone call.

Women are much better talkers than men. For example, if you ask a man of my generation how he is, he will probably say “fine” and leave it at that.

Only on occasions of dire misery or high jubilation would we be tempted to expand on the theme. Women also say “fine” but then they pause, before adding “really”. So we have “fine, really”.

This “really” begins as a hairline crack, almost dismissive in its tone. But then the crack widens until it’s a chasm into which everything can be poured. “I’m fine, really, but you know I mentioned that my elbow’s been giving me gyp – well, I discovered that Mabel had the same problem and, unexpectedly, they had to amputate her foot, would you believe it?”

They’re off and the finishing line’s not in sight yet. Men don’t go in for intimate chit-chat. Our equivalent offering, or at least mine, is a tendency to lecture people about the ills of the world.

If my wife sees pot-holes in the road, I say that they are symptomatic of a capitalist system which has neglected public works because it has catered for the greed of the few instead of the needs of the many.

Queen Victoria said that a conversation with the stern Prime Minister Gladstone was like being addressed as a public meeting. The spirit is the same.

“Anyway,” I said to my wife. “Where was your voice? You obviously found it again.”

“I was looking for it in this long, black tunnel when your snoring woke me up!” she replied.

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