The eldest has her boyfriend, a classical guitarist whom she met in France, staying for what seems to be a month, and suddenly I'm a gooseberry.
In the sitting room where I usually sit forlorn and alone after failing to persuade anyone to join me in there to watch a film on the big HD screen ('we all prefer the kitchen, it's less gloomy,' they say as she and her sister crowd round a laptop streaming The Hills at 20 pixels with Japanese subtitles scrolling along the bottom of the picture) has, overnight, become desirable place for a twin mount to snuggle up on the sofa in front of a DVD. The other day I found myself asking if they minded if I sat in there. I should have taken the firmly closed door as a hint.
'When will you be back?' she asks me as I put my coat on to go to Tom Standage's booklaunch (in the boardroom on the 14th floor of the Economist building, no less). I must look a little perplexed at the question. Nobody has asked me what time I'll be home since my mother died.
'Erm, later...' I reply.
'Yeah, but when? Before ten, after ten?'
Dear God, I think, what activity are they worried I'm going to catch them in. And then I stop thinking. My seventeen year old is barricaded in her room with her 'friend' and the Son has his girlfriend stay over all the time. It's not fair that the only people having intimate contact in my house are my children.
'I dunno, later, when it's finished...' I just manage to stop myself shrugging my shoulders and slamming the front door by reminding myself that I'm not a teenager.
'Do you mind if we have some of your wine?' she calls to my back.
'No, help yourself, ' It's Chateau Plonk from that great Sainsbury's winebox vintage about which a newly divorced bloke I met in the pub last night said understandingly, and with feeling, 'you know it's always there,' so I can't say no - though, as the man said - the whole point of these is the reassuring knowledge that you have it, on tap, as it were. So when I return early at nine thirty - I'm a good mother, I always stick to my curfew, there they are, the two love birds, washing-up (the Designer's Guild plates) companionably, with the kitchen table still set with a couple of my best glasses, some cut flowers from the garden, and presumably a fair whack of my emergency alcohol.
I hang around like the bride's ex-boyfriend at a Stag do while they continue washing-up, eyes not quite meeting mine.
'Did you have a good time?' She asks, eventually, with a deep sigh.
'Yes, it was great fun, amazing view, lots of men in blue shirts, it was like...' but then I realise that she's just being polite and the two of them are waiting patiently for me to push off. I shuffle off up to my bedroom. It's quarter to ten and I'm in bed. Alone. My daughter is downstairs playing houses with her handsome boyfriend drinking my wine, eating my food, in my sitting room... What happened to my life? Thankfully the phone rings. It's my own romantic interest who has been swimming with his son, read him a story and put him to bed. I'm half-ashamed to tell him that I'm tucked up at the same time as his kid, albeit without the story...
Next day she calls me at work to ask if I've left money for the cleaner and her bedroom door is firmly closed when I come in. I make my way back up to my bedroom to which I seem to have been banished. She intercepts me on the stairs.
'What are you doing tonight?'
'I'm not sure.'
'Dad mentioned he might come round.'
'Yes, he wanted to see me before he went off to The Hague (ie his girlfriend who doesn't live anywhere near the Hague but I pretend to believe the fiction of 'work' and in any case, I've got my own weekend plans which as just as little of his business and his are to me).
'It's a bit awkward, him coming round, you know, with Lotharia being here...'
'Okay, I'll tell him not to come.'
'So will you be at home?'
'I don't know, probably. I might go to the cinema.'
In her place I would have given me twenty quid and sent me off, but I'm the mother. I know when I'm not wanted so I go to see Star Trek, pay for myself and get back to hear a faint soundtrack coming from the sitting room with the door, once again firmly closed.
It's been a week now and I realise I still haven't actually spoken to this chap so finding the sofa unusually empty, I sit myself down, feet on table, flip open the laptop and start working.
Daughter, incredibly soliticiously brings me a cup of tea.
'Where's Lothario?'
'In the kitchen, I didn't tell him to come through.'
'Well don't leave him out there on his own. Ask him in.'
Reluctantly she calls him, and in he slouches with a shy smile. The two of them sitting side by side on the other couch like a Victorian couple with a chaperone - me being the chaperone.
'So, Lothario,' I begin and commence my gentle interrogation. He lives alone with his mother. He's half Chinese and half French. He studied engineering. He can mend taps (we have a leaking one...)
'And I hear you are also a classically trained guitarist?' I add.
'Yes,' he agrees enthusiastically, 'I can play the piano, the violin, the clarinet, the guitar, anything really... It's my ambition to have a whole room full of instruments and to be able to play them all.
I laugh and tell him that we had the opposite - a whole room of instruments and nobody able to play a note - a piano, three recorders, a drum-kit, a trumpet, and three guitars...
Daughter winces - she doesn't want me to highlight our family's musical inability but Lotharia jumps in.
'You have a guitar! Really. You didn't tell me you had a guitar! I'd love to see it. It's been ages since I touched a guitar...' He beams at daughter. 'Can you get it out for me?' She looks dubious.
'I think we gave them all away.'
'Oh no, there's the Spanish accoustic one in the attic and the electric one is in Son's room, and I think my brother's old beaten up 6 string is actually in your bedroom on top of the wardrobe.'
She looks at me furiously, miming that I should shut up.
'What's wrong?' I say guilelessly, then turn to Lotharia and tell him he has my full permission to go up into the attic or indeed any room in the house and find himself a guitar. Two seconds later he has disappeared to the accompanying sound of rummaging, returning with my brother's guitar on which, after five minutes tuning, he begins to play Bach's Air on a G String, followed by Fields of Barley by Sting.
It is bliss.
I'm really quite sorry when my friend Nel comes to collect me for our daily walk.
'Gosh, he's a bit of a find, isn't he. So good looking too,' she congratulates me as we leave to the strains of Cavatina.
'Mum, why did you tell him about the guitars?' daughter hisses to me at the door. 'Don't you remember me telling you that I didn't want him to know we had any? Now he'll sit and play obsessively for hours and I'll never get any attention.'
'Oh, I'm so sorry, love, I completely forgot.'
Shame, huh?
I might not be musical but I know how to play with what I have...
