AFTER 25 years of bringing up children, it is time for my wife and I to spend more quality time together – so I took her for a romantic break to the Northumberland coast.

If you get the weather, there is nowhere better, and the October sun was kind to us for the two days we were away.

We walked hand in hand from Dunstanburgh along the clifftop to Craster. We went on a cloudless boat ride from Seahouses to the Farne Islands to see the seals raising their pups. We went on another walk, this time up the sandy beach to Bamburgh, and had a paddle along the way. We enjoyed dinner in a softly-lit seafood restaurant, and slept in a hotel overlooking the sea. More like courting teenagers than a couple with 27 years of marriage and four kids behind them.

It was all blissful – but by far the biggest highlight of our time together was the crazy golf.

Crazy golf has been an important feature of our family holidays, ever since the kids were little, and it has always been fiercely competitive. But you don’t need kids to enjoy yourself, so I challenged my wife to a game on the tricky little course down the road from our hotel.

To my intense satisfaction, I won the first game quite comfortably, mainly by virtue of the fact that she couldn’t get her ball through the opening of a tunnel and took 13 shots on the seventh hole.

Although she would never admit it, my wife is every bit as competitive as me so she demanded a rematch the next day. This time, it was a much closer affair. I was one shot ahead as we approached the 18th – a hole with two humps, followed by a sweeping bend to the right.

I went first and was fairly satisfied to take a three. Just about home and dry, I thought to myself. “Can you take the flag out for me please,” said my wife as she studiously lined up her ball. (These were actually the first words we’d exchanged for quite a while.) I walked up to the hole but got distracted by a low-flying seagull and forgot to take the flag out. Her ball was sweetly struck. It sped over the first hump, climbed purposefully over the second hump, and curved impressively round the bend on the correct trajectory. To my horror, it hit the base of the flag and bounced away from the hole.

Now, I could tell you what she instinctively shouted, but this is a family newspaper. She called me the same unmentionable name again, and told me in no uncertain terms to put her down on the scorecard for a hole in one whether I liked it or not.

“It wouldn’t have stayed in the hole anyway – it was going too fast,” I replied, at which point she stamped her foot, flung her club to the ground, and stomped off back to the hotel.

What matters is that the scorecard shows that I won again. Quite frankly, my wife is going to have to learn to stop being so childish.

THE THINGS THEY SAY

THANKS to colleague Helen Russell for telling me about two-year-old daughter Molly’s recent remark that had the family laughing.

Until recently, Molly called her Grandad “Gaga” and she was obviously a bit confused when she heard her dad talking about the pop star Lady Gaga.

“No, Daddy, it’s Lady Grandad,” she exclaimed.

THANKS also to Paul “Goffy” Gough, of Hartlepool, for sending me this memory of his son Steven, after he’d been to see Father Christmas as a little lad. “He’s very old, isn’t he mammy! Hope he doesn’t die before Christmas.”

CHEERS to Malcolm Rolling on Twitter for telling me about his niece Harriet on holiday in France.

Harriet responded to the chirping in the trees by saying: “Listen to the tennis.”

She meant crickets.