THE BREAK-UP of school for the holidays and the rising of Parliament for the summer are supposed to herald the start of the silly season, (though what MPs do during recess that is sillier than sitting on long benches waggling order papers and hooting like barn owls, I can hardly imagine).

My first summer in journalism was the wet, grey one of 1994 and as all the proper writers disappeared for their holidays I was told by some gnarly old sub-editor that this was my chance for glory. “Nothing happens in the summer silly season, Giles, and if it did there would be nobody here to write about it. It’s your chance to make your name. They’ll put any old rubbish in the paper now.”

And so I wrote about nuns in the property market, the pickling of Kim Il Sung, the publication of Batman: The Novel, the republication of an Edwardian guide to pub signs (on the news pages, mind), a survey that showed that revolutionaries are always younger siblings (it’s true, it’s true: there’s Marx, Lenin, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Darwin, Stravinsky and, well, probably others) and an exhibition of artworks created by cats.

I hid for two nights in a World War Two bunker in Normandy so as to jump out and surprise Ffyona Campbell, who was walking the last miles of her round-the-world hike (she later surprised everybody else by turning out to have got the bus most of the way), and I ghost-wrote a piece for the late Richard Whiteley on the continuing success of Countdown (“broadcasting is an unpredictable medium . . . ”).

Most gloriously, I conducted a witchhunt of former Bolsheviks in the Establishment which included a denunciation of one David Aaronovitch, then BBC managing editor of weekly programmes, now my fellow Times columnist, revealing, I see from my crumbly old cuttings book, that as a student Aaronovitch owned two cats called October and Revolution.

And then the proper writers came back from Tuscany, Napa and Provence, and I went back to my hole. I didn’t make my name. Still haven’t. Never will. Because, after looking through this week’s papers, I have the impression that the era of the silly season is over. World poverty, local drought, environmental decline, energy crises and terrorism are nothing new, but suddenly we have got so serious, so mawkish, that we have allowed them to force out of the papers all the daft crap that, in a world where the scary stuff is available online, on telly and on your mobile phone, is what people really want.

In the week after the July 7 London bombs, The Times felt that it would be best if I did not write a column on the Saturday. I am a silly arse who is not comfortable writing about serious things, and this is no time for writing about anything else. No time for silliness.

Taking the rejection like a man (I wept, I drank, I spent my day off playing cricket), I was reminded of September 11, 2001, when, as editor of The Times diary, I was told that there would be no diary the following day because it would be incongruous in this time of tragedy.

“Woohoo!” I cried, punching the air, misjudging the mood of the newsroom. “Does that mean that I can go home?” It did. But it meant also that I could stay there as the days, and then weeks passed, while the Editor continued to insist that the world was not yet ready for nonsense on the comment page. Not as long as 5,000 miles away a single wisp of smoke was rising from the Manhattan rubble. When the diary came back it was tucked safely away in T2, and then it went for good. No great loss to journalism, perhaps. But a foothold yielded by the forces of levity.

And this week, scouring the papers for silliness, I found very little (a 25,000-mile drive in a Morris Oxford, a weatherman’s denials of wife-swapping) just when I should have found most. The silly season, in line with the sombre national mood, appears to have been cancelled. But is this not, to use the vain, melodramatic terminology of the past fortnight, “just what the terrorists want”?

(God, I hate that phrase — like their objective is to make our morning Tube journeys a bit more of a hassle, rather than world Islamic revolution. I just can’t see the banning of rucksacks on the Northern Line or the installation of metal detectors at Euston occasioning a round of high fives in Fallujah).

Whatever they hit us with, they must not be allowed to stop our summer silliness. Are pet crocodiles in Croydon no longer getting stuck up trees? Are nudists not attempting the Cresta Run? Are women of 93 no longer bungee jumping? I want the inside story from George Michael’s mouse-trainer. I want an interview with Kevin Pietersen’s hairdresser. I want to see a potato that looks like Jennifer Lopez’s bottom (there must be thousands).

To ignore these stories would be to surrender part of what makes us British. For it is silliness in the face of adversity, as much as doggedness, that has so often allowed us to overcome. It was easier to defeat Hitler once we learnt he only had one ball.

So we will keep silences, when instructed, to show respect for the dead. But we must be allowed to blow raspberries afterwards.

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