What I dread (not!) is the day that the supply of material runs out. Then my wings will take dream, because history will have entered the era of the ideal world.

Anyway, back to the Heene household’s helium hokum: Richard is sometimes dubbed an “inventor”. How true that label probably is. Eat your hearts out, Joseph Smith, Erich von Däniken and so on.

The main victim seems to be six-year-old Falcon (and perhaps Mayumi is another, but that’s a slightly different story). The petrified lad has probably being urged to do more inventing than he was led to believe would be needed. When he twice lost his breakfast as testament to his father’s terminological inexactitudes (my thanks go to the memory of a certain more infamous Richard), the world thought: “Out of the mouths of babes.”

Thanks, LA Vess, for that. But I might as well point out, before somebody else does, that the consensus of the fourth estate is that the balloon was filled with helium, not with hot air. Whereas the Heenes’ version of the events . . .

Anyway, if the couple’s latest leaky story about the leaky balloon is eventually shown to be true then the child will deserve a medal if he resisted the urge to leak during his five hours hiding in a roof.

That unfortunate child, who we’ve been told is usually ebullient and rambunctious, seemed during the interview to be paralysed by fear. Realising that his parents’ tall story was running out of buoyancy, his sympathetic tummy automatically jettisoned some ballast in the style of the balloonists of yesteryear. Let’s await further cathartic developments.