GATHER round the dying embers of this fossil fuel, Charlie and Harry, Gimmer Avison croaked to his grandchildren, and I will tell you a tale of times long gone by.
The children shuffled fearfully into the flickering light at the fireside while the old man flexed his fingerless gloves and tucked his straggling silver hair back into his tattered Huddersfield Examiner woolly hat.
It was fearfully because the old man was renowned for his tall tales, in which the past was always more pleasant than the present or future.
And Charlie and Harry were not wrong: it was clear grandad was about to spin another crusty old yarn about the golden days of his distant youth.
"You are too young to remember," the old man said, "but there was once something in the sky called a ‘sun’. You may have seen pictures of it. It was bright yellow, too bright to look at directly, and it would often be stuck up there, with no visible means of support, in what we used to call in those days a blue sky.
"The sun, as it was called, would often appear in the season that we called ‘summer’. This was a time when the air was warm, and you could walk outdoors without small icicles forming on your nose.
"The good thing about the sun was that it emitted lots of light, and by that light, you could see for miles. This was especially noticeable on a clear day. In your lifetimes we had clear days on September 5, 2018 and August 13, 2021.
"When I was a young man somebody told us that there was something called global warming.
"A lot us thought at the time that this would be a nice thing for Britain, because it was never really hot or dry, on account of Britain being an island sitting right on the edge of a huge and very wet ocean called the Atlantic.
"We all thought that global warming would make things better for us. How wickedly we were deceived! What little bit of sun we had disappeared, and apparently those lucky folk in Spain and France and Greece are getting it all.
"This is really unfair, because they didn’t need any more sun. In fact, most of them wanted a bit less, because the sun was actually drying up the land.
"No, don’t look at me so strangely, Charlie and Harry. The sun can do that, and many other tricks besides, like making your skin go brown, and making plants flower.
‘Course, making plants flower is a bit pointless, now there are no bees ... but that’s another matter.
"There are stories that somewhere above the clouds we see today, and saw yesterday, and will see tomorrow, the sun still shines.
"It is my closest wish, dear grandchildren, that you will one day see this miracle.
"In the meantime, Charlie and Harry, if you wouldn’t mind rolling a few more Avison Thursday Columns into spills? The fossil fuel’s just about burnt out."