Friday night. My younger daughter has gone to a 'Pimps and 'Ho's' Party wearing a corset, a pair of shorts and four inch heels - just marginally more than she wears to school if you count the false eyelashes. My long dead mother speaks from my mouth to ask if she's really going out like that and urge her to take a coat. She smiles - an unusual event, for the sun of her pleasure rarely shines on me - and leaves with my last ten pounds without saying goodbye, slamming the door with a demolition bang, the perfume in her wake so strong it makes my eyes itch. It's only after she goes that I realise the scent is mine. Some heavy Hermes stuff the ex brought me back from an Airport on one of his conference trips. I never liked it. I'm glad one of us is using it - albeit as a means of deforestation. I'm also glad to see my daughter go out for a change. Even dressed as a hooker.
My elder son has come back from a holiday in the States where he and his girlfriend stayed with my ex's family, sleeping, like Goldilocks, in my bed - or rather the one I slept in with my husband for every one of the 20 odd Christmases we went there. It's uncomfortably Freudian, seeing yourself replaced and duplicated. 'Did anyone ask anything about the break up?' I wondered, not really expecting the answer to be yes as I haven't heard from any of my husband's family since he left a year ago. 'Not really,' he said. 'Nobody mentioned you. They mostly talked about getting a new dog since the old one died last year.'
It's wonderful to be missed. If only I had been born a Labrador.
Elder daughter, back after three months in France, doesn't like her father coming round to help out with household maintenance. 'He's getting his cake and eating it too,' she says. 'I don't want him here, and none of the others want him here - he left, let him stay gone.'
I protest that I do need a hand around the place as I can't do everything myself. I'm not the maintenance manager, I remind her. And also I don't actually mind his presence. I can set aside my hurt feelings for five minutes of conversation now and again - company, even sometimes the company of miserable ex husband is better than the sound of a slamming door.
She wasn't convinced but I was, and so I agreed that she was quite right. I would be more hard line. The next day I rushed home from work to see her and found her on her way out.
'Where are you off to?' I asked.
'I'm going round to dad's,' she said.
Oh.
She has now gone back to France for a few days to get the rest of her stuff before moving back in as Joint House Mother. She has already put me on a diet, told me to join the gym and counted the bottles of wine which she is ostentatiously not drinking.
It's like a hotel. One in, one out.
Younger son has returned to University leaving a large dent on the sofa where he settled for most of the month he was here after the G20 summit left him with nothing further to demonstrate about.
'What about Sri Lanka? I thought you might have joined in with them being that you don't want to be a one cause anarchist.
'Nah, I don't know anything about it,' he replied, not taking his eyes off Chelsea vs Arsenal.
'I need some help in the garden (as we laughably call the Sleeping Beauty castle of briars in the back of the house). Do you think you might come out and rake up the grass cuttings for me as I can't move my shoulder very well?'
'I don't believe in gardens,' he said.
'Since when?'
'All gardens should be turned over to food production. Flowers are bourgeois.' Indeed. Unlike public school boys.
'Well get a spade then and I'll give you some seed potatoes.' That was an idle threat. I don't have any seed potatoes though there are some in the cupboard with more eyes than the Stasi which would probably take root if I planted them, but I don't think my son would know a seed potato from the couch potato that he has rapidly turned into.
'I have to work,' he protested. 'I have a Portuguese Oral Presentation on Monday.'
'But you're not working. You're watching ruddy football.'
'I'm having a little break.'
I really should stick the pitchfork up his Arsenal but I don't have the lifting capability to swing it over my head and in any case I was so angry I mowed through the electric cable and had to down tools myself.
The lawn now looked like it had had a really bad haircut with a pair of nail scissors.
'You do know the meaning of a workers' collective, don't you - it means we all work for the greater good, not that some of us slave so you can sit around playing Football Manager on your laptop with a parallel text of Don Quixote open on the table.'
'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' his eyes said as they rolled back in his head.
Back in the kitchen the Palestinian National Team comprising a nicely ethnic line up of players were into extra time. It looked like they might go to penalties.
I tied up four bags of brambles and grass clippings ready to fly tip at the end of the road under the cover of darkness outside the posh restored chapel on the corner which is the areas official dumping ground. We leave garden rubbish and old Ikea desk chairs missing a swivel and, as regular readers know, Lady Bountiful from the ugly house puts out half a dozen loaves from Mr Christian's Deli in an artisan basket. I planted my coriander seeds in a pot by the back door - food production don't you know - cleared out the shed, wound up the ragged ends of the power cable I'd cut through and came in to find the young radical had left the building.
A few seconds later he appeared holding a sandwich that, despite having a fridge full to bursting with politically correct produce from an evil conglomerate supermarket who occasionally pay me to write for them, as well as every conceivable tofu and quorn product, he had gone to the cafe to buy.
Never let it be said that he won't make the effort.
So tonight it's just me and the first born son. I asked him if he wanted to have a drink, watch a DVD, something to eat. Yes, he said to everything. That was two hours ago and I haven't seen him since he turned on his computer.
The tumble drier is moaning under the weight of his laundry in the kitchen and so to get away from its nagging I wandered round the corner to Nel's house where she and Tom were sitting in the back garden hunched over a barbecue, drinking vodka. My kind of evening. I sat down on and moved my chair a little closer to the fire and one of the legs sanks into their vegetable plot into which Nel has just planted several rows of rocket and Swiss chard. The leg of the chair cut through the soil like a hot knife through soft butter and I tipped over and landed in the earth. One way to end up in bed, I suppose.
I didn't spill the vodka though.
I wish I could say that I only did it the once...
