This evening I have just observed strange behaviour.

Maddie stays up a bit later than Felix, and we usually let her watch something benign but grown up. Usually it’s National Geographic, this week it has been Stephen Hawking’s film about The Universe. Tonight we boomeranged happily from deep science to an episode of The Good Life.

I assume this BBC series will not be internationally known. It’s from the seventies, a wonderful comedy about what happens when a couple from Surbiton, a London suburb, opts out of the rat race to go self-sufficient. Veg, goats, poverty, the lot.

It is one of our great favourites. Which is why I was interested to find Maddie watching it upside down.

We both watched from totally different angles as the two heroes led  a goat across a main road in uptown Surbiton.

She had her back to the television, and was watching in what can only be described as an advanced yoga pose which combined upside down and back to front in a totally new way.

“Maddie”, I enquired, “Shall I switch this off so you can concentrate on what you’re doing?”

“No thank you, Mummy”, she replied in an inverted sort of voice, “I was just trying out being eccentric.”

She knows what eccentric means, and she quite likes the idea. Now she’s modelling what she thinks might be eccentricity.

Poor mite. In our family, she doesn’t have to try.

My husband is a confirmed eccentric.

I could fill a book with the slightly nutty assumptions and actions he has performed over the years.

When he walks into the room, people don’t just smile. They grin from ear to ear, because the moment Phil walks in, all bets are off. Anything could happen in the next half hour.

A couple of years ago, when an op went pear-shaped, I had a long stay in a very grim ward in a very grim hospital.

Eventually the consultant must have seen the desperation in my eyes, because he discharged me home a little before my time.

What do you do for a homecoming convalescent mother? The sheets were crisp and fresh, the house beautifully hoovered. The fridge was stuffed with good food to tempt a palette rendered desperate by institutional hospital food.

No flowers: but on the bright side, the dog was wearing a tie.

In my honour, Phil had looked out one of Felix’s old ties; and Macaulay was pottering around, slightly bemused because this item of clothing, so prized by city gents, protruded from the place where a collar usually hung.

Phil was clearly proud and pleased that the dog was wearing a tie. The children were enjoying the dog wearing the tie. The dog, I believe, was not so sure.

Flowers, schmowers. I was deeply honoured.

Eccentricity is the art of pleasing barminess. Phil, a proponent himself, is quick to spot soul mates. Mad as a box of frogs, he proclaims, coming home from meeting some new acquaintance who walks delightfully to their own tune.

Barmy: eccentric: it’s not a guarantee of honour.

Felix and I have just started out on an odyssey. A journey which will take us many months, through the birth and death of a world. It will probably play a part in forming Felix’s character, because the same journey shaped the way I thought when I was young.

We have begun the Chronicles of Narnia.

We are right at the beginning, where the Lewis purists start. None of that Lion, Witch and Wardrobe business yet. We have begun with the first children who ever went to Narnia, Polly and Digory.

And Digory’s barmy Uncle, Andrew Ketterly.

This man is deeply unsettling. He is the perfect way to talk to children about adults one can’t trust. He is tall, old and lanky with a wild shock of hair and an almost psychopathic inability to appreciate anyone’s point of view but his own.

While the barmy acts I can remember across my lifetime have largely been harmless, inspired by whimsy or even love, this man is obsessed by magic.

He lives out his twilight years in the attic rooms of a London house he owns with his sister. After a lifetime, he is still engrossed in his life’s work, which involves shady dealings with the land of fairies.

But he is getting close to his aim: to invent a way to travel to other worlds.

A meddler and a minor player in the real business of building and vanquishing civilisations, he can only hazard guesses about whether he will be successful in his latest venture.

He has no honour. He will not risk his own skin. But he has no hesitation in tricking a little girl, who has befriended his nephew, into acting as his unwitting guinea pig.

Would you like to try on this gleaming yellow ring? he says, and she does and vanishes, puff, into another reality entirely.

But, selfish unpleasant eccentrics aside, there are so many times when barminess adds colour to a sepia landscape.

David Edward Sutch was born in Hampstead in the heart of the war: 1940.

A true child of the sixties, he had started out a musician and performer, with his own themed horror stage show, and later a radio station called Radio Sutch.

But it was his glittering political career that caught everyone’s eye.

He styled himself Screaming Lord Sutch, Third Earl of Harrow, although he had absolutely no connection with any peerage.

And he perfected British cheek by standing in elections, latterly as the leader of the Monster Raving Looney Party.

So many seats, so many colourful results: he fought more than 40 seats, rarely threatening their encumbents, but always polling an eminently respectable number of votes.

At one point he even dared to poll several hundred votes in Margaret Thatcher’s Finchley constituency.

After that, they raised the price of the deposit from £150 to £500.

Never mess with the Iron Lady.

Screaming Lord Such died just before the new century, but eccentricity will remain diverting and entertaining, wherever we find it.

Those who dance to a different tune will often be worth watching, and even voting for.

But my favourite eccentrics will be those whose concern is for those outside themselves. Those acts of generosity – a tie on a dog, a little light governor of the electoral process- they may be barmy, but they have an element of the greater good about them.

Long live the altruistic eccentric.