I DO wish that sunny weather put me in a sunny mood. Some people are built for temperatures under 20°C.

That's why my ancestors ended up in a land where it's permanently dreech.

For a small town, we don't half get ourselves in the limelight. Even the last historic episode of Top Gear starring Clarkson, Hammond and May, featured Sevenoaks in a supporting role.

We didn't actually get name-checked. But we were there all right.

So, here we are at the end of 2014, and 2015 is already making your columnist anxious.

Just before Christmas, I spotted a loose catamaran on the lake behind my house, and at once phoned the sailing club, for fear someone had fallen overboard. They sent out a rescue boat packed with people, who circled a chap stranded on a capsized hull.

It turned out to be Top Gear, filming for the next series.

Hope you is chillaxin’, brothas. S-Claus is on da roof! I am totes pashin’ on my prezzies.

Oh, I is vexed. This is A and B and the C of the D¹. And I can’t keep being this hip without a lot more sherry than seems to be left in the bottle.

I’D BE the first to admit I’m not an expert on horticulture. For much of my life I fondly imagined that gardens were essentially what was left when you cleared a space to build a house.

It took me years to realise that you had to go out and buy tulips and hydrangeas and stuff, and then place them carefully and feed them special substances.

It’s not easy living in Sevenoaks and trying to save the planet. Let’s take clothes and the struggle to give them to charity instead of adding to the landfill burden.

I think we’d all have to admit that the arrival of a big new Marks & Spencer means that an awful lot of wardrobe space will have to be cleared. (Not to mention the underwear drawer, but frankly I won’t mention it. Suffice it to say that M&S haven’t arrived a second too soon.)

You see, a foreigner who wants a UK passport has to sit the citizenship test.

We help women with prams up the station stairs when the lifts are kaput. The second the rain stops, we're out clipping hedges so fellow citizens aren't inconvenienced by some wayward privet.

Once the mercury rises, though, things start to snap in the Sevenoaks psyche...

Is it the heat? Or the late nights forced on us by the World Cup? I keep sliding away from the meaning of things.

For days, I drove past a sandwich board advertising this very journal. "01 new flats" I kept reading. I couldn't work out why this was news.

Eventually, I coughed up my 90p and realised at once that I'd misread the sign. The number was "91". That's how many flats they could make out of the Tubs Hill towers.

By the time you read this, the World Cup will be in full swing, and England should have the 1-0 loss to Italy safely under its belt.

Small football matches will be erupting all over town. My son, who hasn’t touched a ball since his team won the Sevenoaks Primary Schools League around 1998, had a spontaneous five-a-side with a bunch of friends last weekend. He’s currently walking like a D-Day veteran. “No wonder footballers get paid so much,” he muttered through a mouthful of painkillers.

(Robert, to save you the bother. Philip was in Life on Mars.)

So why are there still corners of life where you need information but there isn't any?

The bit of this story that intrigued me is that the chap was on a ladder. Y lives in a top-floor flat, a good 40ft from the ground. These days, if a workman has to get anywhere beyond the range of a stretched arm, he insists on scaffolding.

There's scaffolding all over town, have you noticed?

Yes, I know, I exaggerate. None of us has been asked to arrange our hair into that singular style that suggests our ears are radioactive and have destroyed all follicles within a six-inch radius. If the council has been conducting underground nuclear tests, it's been very discreet. We've been able to discuss the grammar school issue without sending in gunboats (although I imagine the e-mails can get crisp).