Meanwhile, back at home........

Beth:

"Those growths," Beth says, pointing with a trembling finger at a small outcrop of five, almost invisible blond strands on one ankle, "are ruining My Life."

I am Good Mother. I agree to wax her legs.

"All my other friends' mothers pay for them to go to a salon."

"How do you know?" I ask, giving a possibly over-sharp tug to the wax that's clinging to her left kneecap like a barnacle, while making a mental pledge to track down the offending mothers and rake their credit cards with machine gun fire, thus putting a temporary halt to their runaway spending power.

"Because - ouch - they've all got photographs of the first time they went."

I add selective mortar attacks on salon cameras to my To do list.

I am not Good Mother, but Bad Mother. And Cheapskate Mother, too, because of my reluctance, mainly financial, to put her almost negligable body hair into the hands of experts.

"Look on the sunny side," I say. "At least you don't have a moustache. But if you do, don't worry. Mum'll fix it." I grin, horribly, and Beth disappears to her room with a muffled shriek.

Francis....

is not happy with his lot, and has taken to wearing socks with a cheery skull motif to get the message across. "How's the job?" I ask him.

"The job? Oh, I don't think about the job," he replies. "It's just an interlude between the two-hour journeys to and from work. And it's costing a fortune. If fuel prices go up again, I'll only be earning just enough to cover my travel expenses."

It's lateish, the children have conversed in screams, kicks and blows for two solid hours and I'm torn between presenting him with a perfectly cooked lasagne, teamed with a green salad and glass of rough, yet delicious red wine or raking him with machine gun fire, too. Decisions, decisions. It's so deliciously difficult to choose.

"My life feels like a series of issues loosely bound together with blood ties," I tell him.

He looks at me thoughtfully for a minute. "No it isn't," he says, finally. "It's a series of wisecracks, loosely bound together by events."

He could be right. There are times when I think adopting the Marx Brothers as role models (wrong sex, but who's checking the pants?) has done me few favours. Laugh at your own punchlines, these days, and you laugh alone. Cry and there's a reality tv show out there just waiting to flood to the rafters with sympathetic tears. I bet yesterday's warm up men are being tastefully renovated as weep up men, proudly getting audiences in a suitably dismal mood before the first of the heart-wrenching confessionals comes on.

I serve him his food and go off to watch 'A night at the Opera' for the umpteenth time, on my own, while the sound of muffled fighting persists overhead.