Get your coat. The sun is out. We need to get to the park before it dips and disappears.

There is a creeping anxiousness now whenever the clouds scarper and there is a brief glimpse of the big yellow ball in the sky.

You need to get out there before the window closes and you miss it.

If you have kids, you need to exercise them the way you would a Labrador in its prime.

They need to walk and run and jump and scream –and preferably outside rather than in living room. For the sake of everyone's sanity.

Yet, like magnets, mine are attracted to the puddles, to the mud, to everything sticky and messy and manky.

Invariably, the dirt sticks. To me. To the freshly washed jeans that take three days to dry indoors.

To my hands, to my face, to my coat and, of course, to them, to every part of them.

We had enjoyed but five minutes of fresh air the other day when, Child Number One, chased down Number Two as he broke off in pursuit of the ever-present ball that accompanies us on every outing.

With a challenge as sinister, cunning and disturbing as any Razor Ruddock or Vinnie Jones would have been proud of, she sent the at-full-speed sibling sliding along the sodden grass at a frankly bemusing pace.

Barely out of the house and already one of them is a woebegone washout.

And it is on days such as this, when we all look as bedraggled and filthy as if we had set up home and spent the night in the park that, inevitably we meet people we know, not particularly well, but we know nonetheless.

This weekend we met the glamorous ones.

You know the mother-of-many who is bright, cheerful, clean, perfectly made-up, makes organic fennel and broccoli salad and comes with an army of kids that look like they have fallen out of a Gap advert.

We are chewing the fat when it occurs to me that, in my haste, to make hay while the sun shines, I have neglected to do some of the basics.

Like run a brush through my hair.

My children look like they run wild in the fields. I fear a citizen's arrest on account of crimes against the eyes given the nick of all three of us.

For every bit of her family that looks pristine and clean – even the pram wheels seemed to have avoided the muck – our filthiness is accentuated.

Still, at least we are all the better for a quick dose of Vitamin D.

And when did a bit of dirt do any of us any harm?