All I want is a second's peace

11:20am Monday 14th April 2008

Comments (0)   Have your say »

You've been playing with your kids all day, laughing at their nonsensical jokes ("Why does a cow say moo?"; "Because it rhymes with poo!"), playing endless games of snap (children cheat, get over it) and throwing a ball 47,000 times for them to catch it once followed by loud cheering and an honorary lap of the garden.

As the day starts drawing to a close and you haven't had a single solitary second to yourself without someone saying "M-u-u-u-u-m" and "Can I have a biscuit?" and "Is it time for Underground Ernie?"

and 'You be the wicked queen and I'll be the princess', every parent in the known world is thinking the exact same thing.

You continue smiling at your dear sweet cherub, but your jaw starts to look a little clenched.

Your brow starts to furrow slightly. And while outwardly you seem happy to be discussing the various pros and cons of being a Tweenie over a Backyardigan (a debate you have had every afternoon for a little over two years), internally you are muttering an addictively repetitive mantra: "I just need five minutes. I just need five minutes. I just need five minutes".

Ideally, of course, you would like five hours to luxuriate in your own solitude, to have a long relaxing bath, maybe watch a film - a whole film from opening titles to end credits - and perhaps even call your best mate for an hour-long, uninterrupted catch-up (complete with a big pot of aromatic, freshly ground coffee and a plate of biscuits not shaped like animals).

Hang on a minute, I'm starting to tear up a bit. Okay, I've pulled myself together now, so let's carry on.

Yes, you would like five hours, but you know realistically that isn't going to happen until the kids leave home. Which, if recent trends are anything to go by, should be around their fiftieth birthday.

But in the meantime five minutes will do. Five glorious minutes with a cup of tea and Loose Women/a book/class A drugs (delete as applicable).

But then on those miraculous occasions when you actually manage to get a whole five minutes to yourself, the little blighters go and spill black paint on your new carpet (my daughter's friend did that one last week), cut their fringe off with kitchen scissors (my friend's son's speciality), eat the berries of a potentially lethal plant (another friend's daughter ended up in A&E on that occasion) or cover themselves from head to foot in glitter (it took a whole bottle of Timotei to get the pesky stuff out of my daughter's hair).

So, in the end, your five minutes with the latest copy of Heat costs you two hours of carpet scrubbing, an emergency dash to the hairdressers, a four-hour wait in casualty and 40 minutes in the bath with a scrubbing brush plus time added on for scooping handfuls of glitter out of the plughole.

It's then you realise it's just not worth it. You'll just have to wait until they've left home.

But you know what'll happen then though, don't you?

You'll be barely into chapter two of your Jilly Cooper and they'll be back with grandchildren for you to look after.

I had caviar for the first time the other day.

I had been dying to try it for years but because Asda don't do a value version of it, I'd never had the opportunity.

But last week the chance arose and I grabbed it with both hands (and most of my teeth). To be honest, it didn't taste of anything very much, but I 'oooh'd' and 'aah'd' in mock delight anyway because I could see that was what everyone was expecting.

I think this emperor's new clothes attitude probably goes some way to explaining why people are queuing up right now in a posh shop to spend £50 on 100 grams of coffee beans that have been previously eaten and expelled (for want of a better word) by Indonesian palm civets.

This cat-cum-monkey creature can't digest the little caffeinepacked nuggets, but we can apparently swallow the notion that coffee beans pooped out by a moggy are better than those harvested in a less gruesome fashion without any problem at all.

They are rare therefore they are better.

If that's the case, I've just found a piece of decrepit green cheese behind the sofa that my cat has been chewing on if you're interested.

Hang on, is that Harvey Nicks on the phone?