When the parents are away...

“In fact,” I said, rather smugly, as the mother of a just-about-to-turn- 18-year-old, “we’ve reached the stage where we think we can leave our two older boys alone in the house while we go away for the weekend.”

Now, we all know that you can never leave a toddler alone for even a few seconds, for goodness knows what dangers could befall them.

What childcare manuals never tell you is that leaving a teenager unattended is even worse.

Of course, we should have realised this, having been young ourselves once. Teenage boys are a danger to themselves and everyone else. In fact, they are a disaster just waiting to happen.

Once we had stocked the fridge with enough food to last a month, we set off for our weekend away with just a few golden rules. No one is to stay overnight and we don’t want you to have more than one friend round when we’re not here.

“Just for once,” I said to them, “have a quiet weekend in. Watch TV, read a book, have an early night. It’s not too much to ask, is it?” I said.

“Oh, and make sure you don’t leave the iron on unattended, don’t be lighting any fires, careful when you’re cooking, make sure you’ve turned everything off when you’ve finished with it...” At this point, my husband yanked me out the door.

“Come on, or we’ll never get away.”

We weren’t too worried – we only phoned home every hour on the hour to begin with. But they reassured us everything was fine and, in time, we relaxed.

“Fantastic,” I thought when we arrived home and the house looked immaculate.

Suspiciously immaculate.

One of them had vacuumed right through. The dishwater had been emptied. Surfaces sparkled.

And then I noticed burn marks on the kitchen table. “What happened here?” They told me they had had a barbecue. “In the kitchen?” I screeched. “It was just one of those little portable tinfoil ones, we started it outside but it got too cold so we brought it in here. We didn’t realise it was so hot,” they said sheepishly.

It occurred to me that the month’s supply of food had practically vanished.

And there were odd things out of place: “You’ve had friends over, haven’t you?” “Yes,” they confessed.

“Just a couple.”

A lucky escape. We didn’t really mind a couple but if we’d actually told them that, they’d probably have had a wild party with a few hundred.

What, I wondered, could the pile of soaking wet towels by the washing machine possibly mean? Once I’d examined the ceilings, I found where the flood had been. The bath had obviously overflowed down into the kitchen. “I was watching TV and forgot I had left the bath running,”

explained Charlie.

It wasn’t over yet. Two days later, I went to use the vacuum cleaner and it blew up. Dirty, smelly water oozed out of the motor. It didn’t take Hercule Poirot to work out that Charlie had tried to vacuum the sodden bathroom carpet.

“Charlie, you could have killed yourself and me. Don’t you understand how dangerous it is to mix water and electricity?”

And then I remembered that he actually got an A in his physics GCSE: “What do they teach you in physics nowadays anyway?”

“Well, they don’t teach us not to vacuum the carpet when you’ve let the bath overflow,” he said, looking at me as if I was the dumb one.

Hmmmmm. Water, electricity, wet carpet and vaccum cleaner: perhaps only A* students are capable of taking the brilliant mental leap it requires to make that connection.

So now I’m just like my friend Jane, following the boys around the house, wondering what they’ll get up to next. And I think we’ll probably stop at home at weekends for the next few years...

JANE was taking the children to York for the first time: “It’s a lovely old city, with ancient city walls. There’s a famous cathedral and a big castle,” she told them. “Oh good,” said three-year-old Emma.

“Can we bounce on it?”