With temperatures plummeting like a hammer off a high scaffold and the rains splattering the streets like someone beneath said hammer I think its time I revealed a secret about myself: in bad weather I often pretend I am a robot.

Let me ‘unpack that’, as Buzzfeed columnists inevitably used to say by the second paragraph of their desperate clickbait crap. I don’t pretend to be a robot per se, waving my arms about and going ‘bleep-bloop’ and ‘Danger Will Robinson!’, rather I pretend my body is a robot. A large robot. Then I pretend there’s a little version of me inside that large robot.

It’s the greatest notion I’ve ever had and it came to me at the age of about eleven or twelve while walking back from our local cornershop in a sudden gale. See, I was getting into Warhammer 40,000 at the time and the boxed game Adeptus Titanicus had just been released, in which 12-storey high automatons lumbered through futuristic battlefields, their metal limbs bristling with weapons and their pilots presumably confident of never getting hold up in traffic.

And that’s the operative word here: ‘pilot’. On that shitty early evening, the wind and rain beating at the hood of my 1980’s parka jacket, I suddenly imagined my body as no longer spotty pubescent flesh but gigantic stainless steel, the rain battering against it to no effect, while the pilot–my pilot–sat comfortably in the electrically heated cockpit of my skull, sipping his cup of cocoa and gazing out of my eyes. And that that pilot was me. The actual me.

Does that make sense? Any sense at all? Because, honestly, I’ve been doing that for thirty years or so now and it’s become second nature. I’ll walk through a storm or a blizzard and, while on one very real level, I’ll be shivering with my shoulders hunched, on a deeper level I’m snug as all heck, sat in a big chair that’s covered with flashing lights and switches and watching the world piss it down beyond the extra-reinforced windshield.

Maybe you and everybody else does this or something similar. I can’t imagine I’m a one-off. But if you don’t… maybe give it a go? It certainly works for me.

Just don’t make bleep-bloop noises. People tend to look.