Entertaining this Easter? Been there, done that already.

Our guests have gone home and I've been left with a fridge full of stale pork pies, a mountain of laundry and a recycling box full of empties. Worse, I have had a glimpse into the future, and it's scary. It is called the Teenage Girl.

The Teenage Girl, I have discovered, spends even longer in the bathroom than I do, has to be humoured out of bed in the morning (but not before 10am) and does everything on sufferance, especially speaking.

We have five years to go before our daughter hits this dubious milepost, but for now she has no qualms about communicating. Indeed, I fear we may have overdone the dinner-table dialogue with her. Bucking the national trend - apparently the art of conversation is dying - she is quick to play us at our own game. 'Mu-um, how can you make me eat my carrots when it's perfectly clear I'm having an emotional breakdown,' being one of the retorts I was treated to recently.

She had high hopes of consolidating her friendship with our guests' ten-year-old son, though she played it cool, warning us, 'Just because he bought me a Coke when I was six doesn't mean to say I love him'. Despite bonding over computer games she confessed to finding him 'a bit childish', which is ripe coming from an eight year old.

I told her to get used to it. My husband and his mate, John, who had come to visit with his wife and kids, seem to revert to a similar mental age themselves when they get together. My husband becomes, inexplicably, 'Spanner' and John is 'The Baron'. They were at school together with a bunch of other lads, who they meet up with once a year, known variously as 'Pliers', 'Devious Fish', 'Buzz', 'Rocky Rose', 'Stax' and 'Grumps', though I never know which is which because it's not how they sign themselves in Christmas cards.

What happens on these annual booze-ups, which are organised in consultation with The CAMRA Good Beer Guide, I do not know. In the old days they used to get hammered (the husband - then boyfriend - would phone me and slur, 'I really, really love you' at about the five or six-pint marker); now, I gather, they sit around and sup their Theakston's Old Peculiar and moan about the state of the world.

In one fell swoop they've changed from overgrown schoolboys to Grumpy Old Men, though the husband's personal hero is Larry 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' David, because he 'doesn't do the stop-and-chat'. If they keep going until their 70s I can envisage it becoming Last Of The Summer Whine.

It should be some comfort that, according to Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner, '80 is the new 40', though that may only be the case if you have a tanker of Viagra parked in the drive.

Rowan Pelling, the luscious pouting editor of the Erotic Review, believes that 50-something men enjoy the best sex of their lives - creaking backs and paunches notwithstanding - so perhaps these Grumpy Old Men are holding out on us.

I suspect, actually, the husband may be a 'Grup' rather than a full-blown GOM, since he's 48, which puts him on the borderline between the two. Grups - a contraction of 'grown-ups' taken from a Star Trek episode (how appropriate is that?) - have been identified as men aged between 30 and 48 who continue to dress as they did when they were at college and whose musical tastes are pretty much stymied at that era, too.

Since Spanner (no, I really can't call him that) believes that good music ended with Pink Floyd's The Wall, this certainly fits. He has websites on Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Hawkwind, which tells you all you need to know.

The latter has had some novel spin-offs. By day he's a project manager; by night he's receiving emails from hairy bikers, so grateful he's promoting the cult space-rock band that he's even been invited to a biker wedding. I bought him a T-shirt from Tesco that says 'Hell Riders' on it, even though he can't drive a car, let alone ride a motorbike. He's not going, which is a shame. I'd like to be a biker chick, if only for a day.

Still, I may get the chance to play groupie instead. During the course of our weekend with the Baron and his family, we discussed future reunions and a big one was mooted - families included - to mark the boys' 50th birthdays. 'You could have a reunion concert!' I enthused (they used to have a prog-rock band called 'Smaug').

'But we never played a gig,' John pointed out.

'A reunion rehearsal,' the husband laughed.

The Teenage Girl's eyes lit up. 'Go on, Dad. It would be great. You should so totally do it.' She and I smiled at each other across the table and I saw a bright, shy, awkward girl on the threshold of becoming a woman and remembered how excruciating I used to find being in adult company when I was that age.

And, suddenly, the future didn't look so scary after all.