We used it for centuries, and everything had been fine until some bloke hopped off the first boat to land in America, looked around and said: "This will do. I think I'll invent baseball, we'll drive on the wrong side of the road and, bugger it, I'll call that letter at the end of the alphabet zee instead of zed."
A couple of hundred years later, the American spellcheck invaded all our lives and the good old Oxford English Dictionary has been on the wane since.
Anyway. I digress. (How unusual).
So. I wake up on Saturday morning and I'm lying there and the first thing that crosses my mind is: "I want to go to the beach."
Actually, that's the second thing that crossed my mind but this is a family newspaper and I can't print the first.
Anyway.
I rouse Mrs P from her dreams of Rod Stewart, Briscoes and a house where the windows are always clean and the toilet seat is always down, and she agrees. Next thing you know, we are speeding to Ohope.
Well sort of. There was the mandatory argument about what "impromptu" actually meant first.
The dictionary explanation means little to my beloved, who wants to tidy up first, have a nutritious breakfast, check the emails and get some washing on.
Obviously, I tell her she looks like a million dollars (she does, by the way) and the rest can wait. We negotiate the purchase of a nutritious breakfast, and coffee, on the way and before you can say 10 times "Did you lock the front door?" we're on our way.
It was a glorious, relaxed drive. Coffee was sipped from a takeaway cup, without a care in the world. Plums were purchased from an honesty box stall on the side of the road. We talked about nothing and everything. And eventually we got to the beach and strolled hand in hand along the vast expanse, like a good-looking couple in a TV commercial.
"Look," I said to Mrs P while pointing to two figures frolicking at the water's edge.
"There's a couple of seals".
She wasn't convinced. "They're not seals. They're kids. Where's their mum?"
Indeed, the mum was nowhere close.
The most likely candidate appeared to be a lady in a deckchair quite some distance away. This drew some disapproval from Mrs P.
"Those kids will be in trouble if a big wave comes in."
And just like that, it did. And the two figures were bowled and dragged seaward.
I shouted to the woman, who appeared not to have noticed the drama and sat motionless. Mrs P and I both began running towards the scene. I was convinced my new shorts were about to get wet in a dramatic rescue. The flip side was the drama would make a good story for this column.
And it has. But maybe in a different way than you expected.
The frolicking kids, as we discovered upon sprinting closer and raising the alarm at the top of our voices, were in fact two large bits of driftwood.
So the moral of this story is: by all means do something impromptu in your life from time to time.
Just don't forget to take your glasses.
Kevin Page has been a journalist for 35 years. He hasn't made enough money to retire after writing about serious topics for years so he's giving humour a shot instead.
