It’s that time of year again, a staple of the Beta Male calendar, after the children have broken up but before we decamp to Pembrokeshire for a fortnight of table tennis and rain. My wife takes Sam and Rachel off to Little Wooden House in Kent, I hold the fort in London and worry I’m neglecting them. Each evening I call, each evening they’re having too much fun to come to the phone. “Daddy? Nah. Who’s he anyway?”

Meanwhile I work late, eat toast, watch the pile of dirty plates grow in the sink and turn the telly on when I should be going to bed. I saw National Treasure: Book of Secrets the other night. The information panel said it was a popcorn movie, and I love a popcorn movie. Then I saw The Benchwarmers. The information panel said it was a screwball comedy, and I love a screwball comedy. (But not, interestingly, a gross-out comedy, an important distinction.) And then I watched 300. The information panel said it was a historical blood bath, and I love a historical blood bath.

Those Spartans, eh? They were something. When the Queen gives Leonidas his shield and says, “Come back with it – or on it,” the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Or they would have done, if Ishmael hadn’t just given me a number four so I can maximise my suntan and look a bit hard on the beach. Oh yeah, those ancient warrior codes live on.

Around midnight I heard a commotion out the back. Paused the telly and went to investigate armed with the remote. Wily Persians? Traitors? Pederastic Athenians? No, next-door’s cat, Maximus, sneaking over the fence and terrorising little Lucky. Yeah, we called the kitten Lucky in the end, couldn’t think of anything better. Besides, she is: I chucked her some ham by way of recompense for getting hissed at. Just flung it on the kitchen floor like a warlord at a feast. Lucky wolfed it down.

Hours later, the first suggestion of dawn over the railway line, I went into the garden again and thought about famous last stands. The Alamo and the Bighorn, Masada and Dien Bien Phu. I thought how if it were me, I’d try to be the guy chosen to sneak off through the enemy lines to get reinforcements. Or try to claim some sort of press immunity. “But I want to stay with you and die with honour.” “I know, Bob, but someone must tell the world what happened here today!” “Oh, OK, do you think so? Well, if you insist.”

Even so, I thought maybe I should revive some of that Spartan ethic. Start walking around in a short skirt, do loads of sit-ups, chuck a few of my rivals down a well. But then I thought, it’s not really me, driving my son to Epping Forest in the winter and leaving him there. I’m not cut out for that lean and mean ascetic ethic. When I read Ian Fleming as a teenager, the point at which I realised I could never be Bond (a seminal moment in a young man’s life) was when he got in a freezing cold shower and made a ritual of standing under the stream for 60 seconds. I start howling if it goes so much as lukewarm.

A few years ago I met Chris, a bloke I’d been at school with, and we were catching up, and he told me when he’d been captain of the 1st XV at Keele, he’d made it a rule that however drunk he got in the bar at night, he’d force himself to be first one in the gym, the library or the lecture hall next morning. I remember thinking: now why didn’t I do that? When I got drunk at university, and often when I didn’t, I’d lie in bed the whole of the next day.

Back in the present, the choice was either throwing a discus around in the nude, or going to bed, so I put Spartan into Google and had a surf around ancient Greece. Bit embarrassing actually: I’d watched 300 for ages thinking, hold on, surely the Spartans did their thing at Thermopylae, so why do they keep going on about marching to the Hot Gates? Thermopylae is such a cool word, and Hot Gates sounds rubbish, a sexed-up version of the guy who runs Microsoft. Wikipedia put me right. Sometimes I worry I genuinely am a bit thick.

I also discovered Spartans lived in Laconia, and they didn’t say much, they just killed you basically, hence the word laconic. Good fact, I thought. At the school prize-giving at the end of term, the speaker said how education was all about reading books, and I thought, you know what, he’s got the best of intentions, but he’s wrong. As a point of entry to many subjects, films, TV, comics, newspapers, magazines, games and now the internet are better than books.

Anyhow, I slept until 10am, and then went downstairs to face the builders, who’d been at work in my kitchen for two hours. “Nice lie-in, Bob?” asked Ted pointedly. “Sorry,” I said, “it’s hard when there’s no one to tell you to go to bed.” “It’s called self-discipline,” said Ted.

robert.crampton@thetimes.co.uk