My daughter Ellen is working in Monsoon in the city centre and has been for the last four years. All her wages go on clothes and clubbing – certainly none of it lingers in her bank account. Bobby left school at sixteen with very little to show for it and has yet to decide what his future holds. He’s drifted in and out of jobs since then. Plumbing, he decided, was the thing for him – he lasted six weeks. Then he tried his hand at painting and decorating – that one managed to enthral him for nearly three months. Since then he’s done odd jobs, mainly cash in hand and barely enough to cover his mobile phone bill. I keep nagging him to go to college, learn a trade, do something that will ensure that he doesn’t spend the rest of his life living hand to mouth. But what can I do? He’s turned eighteen – he’s supposed to be a man, not a child any more. What I feel like doing is pinching hold of one of his ears and pulling him down to the college myself to sign him up to do something – anything.

They both take after their father. It isn’t me they’ve inherited their inert disposition from. As I’ve grown older I’ve become full of unfocused, unrealised desire and ambition. It’s just that I’ve never managed to do much about it. My role as wife and mother has taken priority and has subsumed any natural instincts to strike out and do something different. Well, no longer. This year is going to be my year.

I get a cursory hug from Ellen, and Bobby says, ‘All right, Mum?’ And they sit down.

They’re hardly ever here so that we can have a family dinner together. I’ve spent the last two years trying to make sure that they’re at least home at dinnertime so that we can all eat together, but it’s like pushing water uphill. The lure of the latest trendy bar straight from work is often more appealing than my traditional cooking. In the end, I got fed up with throwing dried-up dinners in the bin and now they largely do their own thing – which seems to involve constantly grazing from the fridge when they grace us with their presence. Dinner together as a family normally happens only on high days and holidays, and soon they’ll be gone altogether. Then it will be just me and Greg and his fishing rods. What will I do then?