There is no white wine.

This is an unprecedented state of affairs. Have you ever been in a pub and asked for a glass of white wine, only to be told: “We have no white wine?”

Well, I have. This horror is compounded by the follow-up statement: “You can have red wine if you want.”

We are in Whitby, on a baking hot day in April. April! We have had fish and chips and sat on the beach and walked up the 199 steps to the Abbey.

All that is required for the missus is an enervating glass of white wine.

Yet there is none.

I, of course, as I am driving, will be happy with a cup of coffee (although it seems an alien thing for me, to order a cup of coffee in a pub. It’s like buying cigarettes in a chemists).

We stand there, uncertain what to do. Being offered red wine when you want white wine is not really a viable option. The wife does not want to have a lager, or a bottle of anything else. She wants white wine.

Leaving a pub without buying a drink is also a foreign concept to me. Is that allowed? I have never done this before. Walk to a bar, ask for a drink, and walk out again without having one.

That’s because pubs don’t normally run out of white wine at three o’clock in the afternoon.

We smile and wait, and thankfully the barmaid goes off to serve someone else, giving us the opportunity to shuffle out of the pub.

We stand on the street, bemused. It is as if everything we thought we knew has been exposed as a lie. Pubs having a constant supply of the basic alcoholic beverages is one of the things you take for granted. They might run out of particular brands of drink, or certain shorts after a busy night, but no white wine?

It’s not as if wine isn’t a total rip-off in pubs anyway. It isn’t as though someone couldn’t have nipped to the Spar, bought three bottles of own-brand plonk for a tenner, and sold it off at four quid a glass.

It just doesn’t make any sense at all that this pub does not have wine. It is like we have fallen into a parallel world where everything is the same as ours except for one crucial fact, and that is the abundance of white wine in licensed premises.

Thankfully, the next bar we go into has plenty of white wine. Gallons of it. They are practically bathing in the stuff. I have my coffee, and feel only slightly perturbed.

A few days later there is a programme on the TV with a nun talking about a painting of Jesus at the marriage in Cana. He is doing a bit of jiggery pokery and a huge jug of water is being poured out as lashings of wine.

We look at each other, and shake our heads, and wonder what the world has come to.