Some strange things happened on our holiday.  Not this year, you understand.  It would have been about 18 years ago when we went with friends caravanning to Dorset.

We stayed at a site at Wimborne and had gone out for the day to Christchurch.  The first thing we did there was to hire a put-put motor boat and puther up the Avon.  My mate Ray was at the wheel with me alongside him in front.  Judy and Angela were sat at the back with our 4 kids in the seats in between.

“Imagine my surprise” (as they used to say in the Readers Letters in girlie mags) when a fish leapt out of the river straight into our boat; and it was a big fish.

The next few minutes were lively ones indeed. The fish flapped around in the bottom of the boat, Ray was steering round in circles, onlookers were gawping from the bank, the kids were crying and Judy was screaming for me to get rid of it.  I had a better idea though and clonked it on the head with the starting handle.  That quietened the fish and then everyone else.

Because it was the start of the day we had to decide what to do with it.  Nobody wanted to go anywhere near a stinking fish so it was left to me to hump it round Christchurch for 8 hours in a Tesco carrier bag.  And it was heavy!  I don’t know exactly how heavy because we didn’t have any scales.  But it measured 23 ½ inches and was a sea trout.

Naturally nobody would fillet it so that was my job, hacking away like the Swedish Chef in the

Muppets, “Head, Tail, Gut, Bucket”.

When it was cleaned I cut it into steaks – around a dozen or so- bagged it and stuffed it into plastic bags for our

freezers.

The following day we were discussing what to have on the barbeque for tea that night.  I said, “I think I’ll have one of my fish steaks”.

“They’re not your steaks” said Judy.  “They’re our steaks”.

The repulsion of killing it, carrying it and gutting it had vanished once it was clean, pink and sanitised in plastic bags.  No-one noticed the irony.

Why this was strange is self-evident; fish don’t leap out of the water into boats.  But it was just one of a batch of unlikely incidents that occurred that week.

A few days before lightning had struck a tree on the caravan site feet away from our vans and on the journey home a bird flew into our car.  Not especially notable in itself except that I was travelling at the time and it came in through the sunroof.  No-one even saw it.  The first thing we heard was a soft “douff” from the back of the car and a fug of downy feathers floating above the rear parcel shelf on which, of course, lay the dead bird.  It had flown in through a 9 inch gap travelling at 60 mph without touching its sides.

Perhaps that was the week we should have played the lottery.