So far during this life I’ve spent every Christmas at my parents’. This can be attributed to a combination of factors: my parents’ legal and moral responsibility, the indefinite postponement of starting my own family and my adult life spent living in freezing inner London flats without adequate central heating.

But added to this is one further reason to keep retreating to Wales: Christmas is the time of my father’s annual night out on the lash with his workmates.

Although one of my warmest childhood memories is being sat on my father’s knee and sipping from his can of beer when I was not into double figures, my father has never been a heavy or consistent drinker; the occasions when I’ve seen him pissed are dodo-esque. My mother, on the other hand, I’ve seen pissed and so, ahem, tired once that she passed out on a plane back to Blighty from Malta (and has never heard the end of it, even though it was twenty years ago). As for myself, there were more than a couple of times in my teenage years when I had to be collected from places by my parents, particularly when I passed out after drinking too much vodka at a party when I was sixteen. It was a shame I blacked out when I did, as I was quite sure I was winning the argument with a priest about abortion at the time.

It’s a shame my father doesn’t drink a little more frequently as there is something quite Captain Haddock-like about him (he has the boat and the build, if not the beard), and also because there’s few things funnier than watching a hopelessly inebriated parent pretend to be not 100% sozzled.

Because my father doesn’t drink much he’s clearly going to struggle to keep up with his workmates on a ten-hour binge.

Last year was no exception.

I came in from my own Christmas beano to see my father marooned on the dining room sofa, swaying about as if it was a particularly choppy evening on the North sea. He recounted the day’s / evening’s events, mortified not by how much he’d drank, but how much he’d spent on drink (probably the key tempering influence on my father’s drinking habits).

Sniggering at my father’s alcohol-induced shipwrecked state, there was one thing you could say for certain about the Captain.

Haddock had had his chips.