It's your funeral. Which will happen sooner than it needs to, because I read that married people live longer than single people.' 'That's not true,' I reply. 'It just feels longer.

Before I go to bed, I clear a safe access path from the front door to the bedrooms. I'm not going to put everything away, because it will all be out again tomorrow, but this is my concession to good housekeeping: to make sure we can get out without breaking our necks if there's a fire.

Discarding possessions in his wake, Tim just drifts along happily through life. My dad calls him deciduous, and Laura's take on it is that he keeps losing things because he feels he had lost his father.

Lola is a sociopath in a children's book and TV series, sister of Charlie, one of the great long-suffering brothers of literature.

I didn't father two wonderful healthy daughters in order to miss my show because I'm getting more naan from the kitchen, Laura.''Stop pretending to be sexist, Dad. No one's falling for it. We know you're just lazy.