Hopping mad

My wife is saying she needs the house to herself...

'But where will the rest of us live?' I cry. 'What will I tell the children?'

'For the afternoon ,' she says wearily. 'Just till I've finished my jobs.'

'Oh right. But what am I supposed to do with them? Look at the weather out there!'

Of course she doesn't really need to look at the weather out there - not only because for some unfathomable reason the sun seems to be rather inconveniently blazing its head off but because, entirely by chance, she happens to be in possession of a leaflet advertising a lovely little ceramics workshop in town where a father at the end of his tether might take the kids and leave them decorating egg cups and pottery hedgehogs while he goes off to have a haircut or visit a prostitute, though obviously I won't personally be doing that bit because the four-year-old will need help with his paintbrush and by the time I've paid for firing and glazing and breakages I'll barely have enough pocket money left to buy the little mites a Milky Way on the way home, let alone shoot the breeze with Bunny (a barber by the way, not a woman given to standing in a doorway without a skirt, of whom in any case there are remarkably few in our leafy town) on the perennial topics of where we plan to go for our holidays and the latest detailed intelligence surrounding his growing collection of barometers.

So off we go. Luckily, the eldest is out being antisocial with his friends, so it's just the four of us. I buy them a dinky little saucer each (which, looking at it one way, is £15-worth of agonising spending choices I now don't have to worry about, plus I figure it has to have the edge on trying to get them all in and out of bowling shoes), and we are soon enjoying ourselves splodging paint over each other and having screeching matches over the best colours. 'I'm doing a tiger,' says the little one, with his little tongue out, carefully stippling blue spots on a yellow creature with a giraffe-like neck and three legs. The other two are jealously guarding their work, suspecting each other of not having their own imagination.

At last we're done and the cheerful woman puts them in the oven (the saucers, not the children) and tells us to come back tomorrow, when we will be the proud owners of something you can put paperclips in.

But we still have an hour to kill, and I suppose we could go to the library but - what luck! - in our absence the high street seems to have turned into the tornado scene from The Wizard of Oz, with innocent shoppers being blown down the street after their wayward hats, and market stallholders hoisted into the air by their own stripey awnings amid spiralling blizzards of ovengloves and novelty tea towels bearing the unconvincing likenesses of Premiership footballers. We manage to make it to the car without being hit by fugitive traffic cones or flying Sainsbury trolleypark attendants, and get safely home to find the roof blown off the rabbit's hutch and the poor thing cowering in shock under a chair in the front room while my wife desperately chases all over our communal grounds trying to retrieve pages of newspaper from his toilet area before someone reports us to the residents' committee for being Guardian readers.

I try to tempt the rabbit out with a piece of bagel. No thanks, he says, though he does eventually come hopping out in pursuit of a balloon. How can he think about sex at a time like this? Predictably, it ends in a bang, though not the kind that might relax his nerves a bit.

The eight-year-old comes running in. 'Dad, can we get my kite out?'

'Only if you want to end up in Basildon,' I say.

My wife arrives back with the news that our garden furniture is making its way across the farmer's field and that the jungly stuff growing up the back wall is down and in danger of bringing the TV aerial with it.

'Blimey,' I say. 'I'm glad it's not my house.'

· phil.hogan@observer.co.uk

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