I LOVE silly humour. My Uncle Ron once amused me with this response when someone asked him how my Auntie Marian was.

“Oh, she’s much more settled now she’s under the patio,” he replied.

His doctor once inquired if he was a man of regular habits and he responded: “Of course I am - I drink four pints of beer and smoke 20 cigs every day.”

Uncle Ron worked in my dad’s building firm and often came out with funny little gems without warning.

It’s probably unfashionable now, but most of them were about his long-suffering wife.

There were funnies like: “Your Auntie Marian went to the dentist the other day - he says her teeth are all right, but her gums might have to come out!”

Auntie Marian was often the butt of Uncle Ron’s jokes.

She was from originally Wiltshire and had a particularly strident voice.

Once as a lad I was helping my uncle on a building job when he lifted up his head and inclined it in the direction of the town railway station a mile away.

“Your auntie’s just got back from visiting her sister,” he said.

“How do you know, Uncle Ron?”

“I can hear her asking for a taxi!”

What’s interesting to me about Uncle Ron’s comedic love of life is that he had every reason to be miserable.

After the war, he joined the army as a career soldier and was quickly selected to be a colonel’s batman.

But Uncle Ron’s military career was cut dramatically short while on manouvres in Scotland. The jeep he was a passenger in careered off the road and he ended up smashed against a wall. Doctors put a metal plate in Uncle Ron’s skull and he always wore a cap to hide the flattened top of his head. As well as his handsome looks, he lost the sight in one eye and his sense of taste and smell.

Thankfully, the accident never claimed his wonderful sense of humour.