Farewell, then, garden swing seat. We hardly knew ye.

Those with long memories and poor social lives may well recall that back in May I wrote about the edifying experience of putting together a load of green metal tubes and screws of varying sizes to create a wondrous feature for the garden in the form of a swing seat. This was going to be the place where we would lounge during the long, glorious summer weekends, sipping Pimm’s and reading passages from our favourite books out loud to each other, soundtracked by the lazy droning of fat, satisfied bees and the happy song of birds.

Of course, the reality wasn’t quite like that. For starters, have you seen the price of a bottle of Pimm’s? And that’s before you buy some lemonade and a load of cucumber to chuck in it. Oh, and summer was, as usual, utter tripe. So the swing seat sat by its lonesome in the garden, the screws gently rusting, while we instead watched the rain fall from inside.

But then a brief burst of Indian summer took us back outside. Sunshine! In September! And at the weekend, not when we were stuck in the office! A last hurrah for the sunshine, a final opportunity to bask in golden, honeyed sunlight.

With a glass of lager (look, the Pimm’s was just a stupid pipe-dream, all right?) I took my book out into the garden. Not to read passages from it aloud to my wife – that, again, was the sort of silly fantasy that gets me a reputation for sticking my head in the clouds rather than watching where I walk. Besides, it was a horror novel that would have ruined the summery vibe, somewhat. I sat down on the swing seat, to enjoy my day.

There was a loud ripping sound. I concentrated on my book and tried to ignore it, but my wife had heard it too.

“What was that?”

I lifted up the padded seat of the swing and glanced underneath. “Oh, nothing,” I said airily, but I was sadly unable to disguise the fact that I was sitting several inches lower and my backside was sticking through the bottom of the suspended hammock.

“You’ve broken it,” said my wife.

There followed a reasoned discussion about whether I had, actually, broken it (her view) or whether it had merely broken while I was in the vicinity and would have broken anyway, no matter who had sat upon it, and it just happened to be my bad luck that I was there when it happened (my view).

This subsequently turned into a debate about the size of my posterior (big and getting bigger, by all accounts) that I had no hope of winning and which, to at least one of us, rendered my point of view utterly redundant.

So summer ended as it had begun – me, cross-legged in the garden, attacking some pieces of green tubular metal with a wrench. Summer: It was fun while it lasted.