An old hippie speaks out.

I am officially coming out tonight!

Yes, I'm a member of the "Basil Fotherington Thomas Fan Club" and proud of it.

For those of you ignoramuses who haven't a clue, Basil was a character in the Molesworth books by Ronald Searle (see "The Complete Molesworth" or "How to be Topp," for example). Basil would skip around the grounds of St Custard's Boarding School for (not very bright) Boys saying "Hello Clouds, Hello Sky". Nigel Molesworth himself described him as "a Weed and Utterly Wet".

Anyone who has ever read children's fiction will realise that the key device for writers is to remove adults from the story right at the start. You can brutally kill them off (as in Harry Potter) or send them to war, or just have the children become evacuees, but you absolutely have to get them off the scene. Boarding schools are an ideal setting.

Ronald Searle placed Nigel Molesworth as my guide to survival in such a brutal place as a public school for boys, as though Ronald was actually Nigel (the central character) himself, but I think he was secretly Basil Fotherington Thomas.  Whilst playing along with the obviously flawed idea that only boys who were good at sports could be "Topp" and therefore worthy of worship, Searle, who was an artist after all, revealed his tender side in his knowledge of the arts by playing "Fairy Bells" on Mrs Curwen's piano or drawing knights in armour on his blotting pad.

Now, while I am bearing my inner soul (in the manner of a Tory MP pretending to be honest with you in an attempt to win votes to become Prime Minister) I should also admit to spending a few psychedelic evenings watching trees eat themselves over Glastonbury Tor against a too vivid orange sunset. No doubt my past partly explains why I look to the skies rather than the TV but being long sighted is probably just as  relevant.

But my first revelation about the wonder of clouds came much earlier than my hippie phase, around the age of ten during a family holiday in Scotland.

We had borrowed a few Scottish quid off an uncle to get us to the Isle of Skye and back to Edinburgh, only to find that, due to the Free Church of Scotland,  the ferries did'nae run on the Sabbath, ye ken. We had to stay the whole weekend on the island so we set up camp on the beach near Dunvegan Castle. In the stillness of an early dawn I crept out from our blue and orange canvas tent onto the pure white and pink sandy shoreline and froze in amazement at the scene in front of me. Clouds, islands, sea and shore were all shot through with pink and grey. It was impossible to separate reality from illusion or solid land from ethereal sky or sky-reflected ocean.

For all the years afterwards, in the hours around sunset or sunrise when the slanting light illuminates clouds from the side rather than from above, I have tried to re-live that moment when landscape, sky-scape, seascape and cloud-scape merge to form a solid image. And, do you know what?, It actually happens on most evenings for those of us who choose to spend dusk or dawn outdoors.

This very evening, while soaking in the tub outdoors in Brampton, I watched the cloudscape shift from white-and-grey to pink and the deepest blue and I remembered the Isle of Skye, the Seychelles, Kenya, Costa Rica, Uganda, Tanzania, Yellowstone, Ascension, the Falklands, Cuba, the Gower Peninsula and all those other amazing sunsets and sunrises in my life and I burbled "Hello Clouds; Hello Sky!"