Valenties Day: and a repost. Phil’s birthday is in August, but this expresses my sentiments for the day exactly.

On this day an unspecified number of years ago, a little baby boy was born in a hospital in Wimbledon.

Since then he has insisted that he is a Londoner to anyone who will listen.

In fact, my subject grew up in a gracious Victorian seaside town, with its spacious dwellings and a centre full of label stores and posh restaurants. And for the young, a full and fabulous social life.

His name, alongside all of ours, is carved on the pier.

And since I met him life has just been one long cabaret.

Because as everyone who knows either of us will tell you, he’s my husband, and he’s one of life’s great eccentrics.

How to sum up a man who cannot be limited by simple print?

This is the man who left an inflatable gorilla on the stairs of our glass-doored house when we went away on holiday, to ward off burglars. The man who spent a chilly hour rescuing our pond goldfish after we had moved (the new owner threatened its life unless we collected it) and turned up at a top nouveau cuisine restaurant with a bag of goldfish and an order of egg and chips. Which he was duly served. This is the man who volunteered to shake a bucket for charity at an open air pop festival, and ended up roping in  members of a battle re-enactment team to demand money with Napoleonic menaces from the crowd.

He is really best, or rather most himself,  seen or heard. A former newspaper journalist, his greatest love is radio news. When my daughter was young I used to sit her down to listen to daddy on the hour.

He does not speak, so much as proclaim. About 75 per cent of what he says is dependable, the other 25 per cent highly questionable, but it’s all spoken with great authority.

Here’s a cliché: he walks into the room, and everyone looks. And it’s not because his trousers have fallen down. It’s because he is as magnetic as the day he ambled into my dusty newspaper office about 20 years ago.

He became known as Badger Man because of his close working relationship with a local badger group. Any story, he was their top contact. It was an affectionate running joke at the News office. The fact that he broke some of the great news stories in our town at the time- and was present at the infamous Poll Tax riots- was taken for granted by the little band of journos in our newsroom.

Four or so years ago, when I duty-managed a theatre for a short time, The Wind in the Willows came to our stage. Part of the merchandising was a perfect badger, complete with tie, waistcoat, jacket and dapper trousers.

I’m not a sentimental cuddly toy kinda gal. But I picked badger up, paid for him and brought him home for Phil.

Badger has been with us ever since. And it is a token of the childrens’ esteem that a subtle little game has evolved around him.

It involves the children stealthily undressing the badger. Not too much: at first it was just his jacket. Phil would come home from work and express theatrical mock outrage that Badger didn’t have his jacket on. The kids would dissolve in helpless giggles and roll around on the floor laughing.

Lately it has developed, mainly because we can’t find his jacket. It has taken a bawdier turn: now Badger generally appears without his trousers.

I have just returned a text from my sister. It says my niece left Badger without his trousers by the kettle last night, so her Uncle would find it. What happened? She is desperate to know. Nothing like a bit of panto indignation to spice up a Tuesday morning.

And the best bit of it is, I live with Badgerman, day in, day out. Now he’s busy running the internal communications of a big national company: but he’s coming home early for a barbecue, using his beloved chimenea. There will be some young company, some old, and several hours of steadfastly entertaining oratory.

Happy Birthday, Badgerman.