​Granddad always says he’s a scientist, an inventor, but really he’s just crazy. He’s never discovered anything, his inventions are all just broken wheels and elastic bands gathering dust in the shed and to be honest his “Scientific methods” leave a lot to be desired.

One day – he’d been dropping cakes from the belltower of the local church to test a theory of gravity that relied entirely on knowing the precise sugar cravings of people in Australia – he burst excitedly into our house yelling about a way to travel through space without leaving home.

He says that sort of thing all the time, and it usually turns out to mean “Watch Star Trek on TV”. We barely looked up from the hog roast as he yammered on about frictionless quantum acceleration and synaesthetic projection modules.

That was last month. This week the press arrived at our door to congratulate Earth’s first interstellar astronaut on a safe trip. I had no idea what they were talking about, but they were welcome to talk to Granddad, who would be very interested in that sort of thing.

Yesterday, Mum baked him a cake with “Congrats Dad #1 Spaceman!”. He looked at it in ever such a funny way, picked it up and took the whole thing away with him. I did tell her not to bother with the icing.