Most people think that the days are getting shorter at the moment, but we parents know better. For those of us who administer children, the first few weeks after the clocks go back are the longest days of the year. Your child wakes at its usual hour, but, unbeknown to them, 7am has now become 6am. What’s a dad to do?

In my case, the answer is that about three minutes after your son has crept into your bed to stage-whisper in your ear every 30 seconds, “Now can we go and make some porridge, Daddy?”, you give in and get up.

Thus it was that on Tuesday last week, by 6.45, with the porridge already finished, I was slumped on the carpet nursing a strong cup of tea, listlessly pushing Thomas the Tank Engine around the train track. Bento, 3½, was more than wide awake. He has a voice-transforming megaphone that he likes to use when he is in character as the Fat Controller and, despite the earliness of the hour, he was making full use of this appalling device.

As the appeal of directing his father in a Darth Vader voice to drop off the passengers at the park, stop, start, speed up, slow down, etc, began to wane, I fired up YouTube and we spent the next 15 minutes dancing around the kitchen to the Toy Dolls’ rendition of Nellie the Elephant. It was 7.15, I noted with disbelief, as Bento and I jumped in the air and waved our trunks at each other, giving it so much “woooooooooo . . .” at the chorus crescendo that I started to feel sick. I’ve always been a morning person, even in the days when I didn’t used to go to bed first, but this was bloody ridiculous.

Outside, it was just starting to get light. This gave Bento his next idea — a bike ride. Ever since he mastered riding his bike a month ago, it has become his big obsession and he wants to do it as often as possible. I resisted for about 20 seconds, but the sun was shining and who knows how often that’s going to happen in the next 20 weeks? The good thing is that his cycling has improved to the point that we can go together, each of us on our own bikes.

On the way home, some cobwebs in the hedgerow glistening with dew in the early-morning sunlight caught his eye.

“Those are fairy beds,” he told me solemnly.

“Really?” I said. We put our bikes down and clambered up the bank to take a closer look. A small bug wriggled in one of the webs.

“Look, Daddy, a fairy!” he cried. I just managed to get him back on his bike before the fairy and a voracious-looking spider met.

“Daddy,” he said, as we cycled home, a full day behind us at just 8.15am. “Why was that fairy still in bed?”

Well, son, let me explain . . .

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