Mexican stand-off

So, off he goes into the night to work off some aggression on the squash court, another day passed with women dogging his day. First me, anxious, twitchy and frankly grumpy about not having a job and fearful of being branded a substandard candidate (not shitly incompetent but not quite good enough). So, yes, I was twitchy and annoying even myself.

Poor Lizzy bore the brunt of it. "Mumma, can you play with me?", she asked for the 10th time since getting in from school, me ignoring the little girl who only wanted a companion to play horses at a birthday party with. "No. Go play elsewhere," I snapped, not looking away from the computer screen where a Hotmail message was slowly taking shape, a reply to a good friend at present literally tightening her own noose by indulging in a dangerously complacent extra-marital. Lizzy hung her head and walked off.

Oh, dear Lord, that awful feeling when all the whingeing and moaning, whingeing and moaning you did about your own 'self-obsessed', head in the clouds, deluded parents goes out the window and you find yourself behaving like a 'self-obsessed', head in the clouds, deluded parent. I ran after her. "I'm sorry Pop," I say genuinely, striding into the spare room where she is perched on the edge of the bed looking blankly at animated Justin from Something Special as he signs the word 'cow'. I crouch down and hug her. She smiles weerily, not taking her eyes from the TV, and I eventually sliver back over my own silvery slime into the dining room where my dreaded Hotmail reply lies waiting.

An hour later, however, Pop and I are thankfully back on top, folding pants carefully into her top drawer. We like this game for some reason, checking out whether it's indeed a princess or a butterfly that adorns the front as we stack each pair neatly onto the last.

Then tea-time comes and minced beef, taco shells, pots of chopped onions, salsa dip and grated cheese, tomatoes and guacamole are dished up by Owen, looking simultaneously fearsome, tired and dejected. Lizzy, on the other hand, is full of beans, not of the re-fried variety. "What's wrong?," I asked the head of the table, trying to be compassionate but knowing Victor Meldrew was not about to divulge. "Just don't even ask," he said firmly while at the same time making it understood it wasn't on this occasion my petulance or Lizzy's which had upset him.

Fiona. His first born. Gotta be. Ok, bearing in mind I've said before he has two children, it should be known he has a third. A 16-year-old bi-product of a one night stand in a high rise in Inverness. A blip in an otherwise exemplary record and one which didn't go down at all well with father-to-be's famille. And in comparison to the self confessed Mr Ultra Sensible, who rarely allows emotion to get in the way of a practical solution, the ultra volatile, angry teenager who's led like a lamb to the slaughter certainly doesn't seem to be chip off the old block. I've never met her as she is hundreds of miles away in Scotland but, from what I've been told, this pair may as well be different species.

This particular 'I'm at the end of my tether' moment had been a few days in the offing. Twenty-four hours earlier, Fiona had been turfed out of her rented accommodation for the young and displaced, needing a place to call their own and guidance on how to survive in the big, bad world. With a free bit of Christian preaching thrown in. She'd had a chance after being hurled out of her mother and Owen's ex' home six months earlier, a flat incidentally crammed full with lizards, cats and benefit forms, and was doing well at college on an agriculture and rural management course. She'd also given up the fags and