My parents are having one of their infamous dinner parties, where starters are not even considered until well past nine pm, where the carpet on the stairs is hoovered for the first time in months, where us kids are ‘dealt with’ hastily half an hour before eight o’clock - a pizza shoved into the oven, served unceremoniously with a bottle of Sainsbury’s Own ketchup.

As ever, the conversation when the guests arrive quickly turns to Growing Old Disgracefully. They are setting up a branch. Not satisfied with their plans for the Brampton Commune and the mocking of young couples marrying at the registry office just opposite, not content with the idea of English post-it notes on pots of English hummus and shaming their grown up children with the drifting smell of incontinence, they are planning a Spanish Commune also. Spain being the half-home of one of the couples here tonight (tanned and sparkling with the air of never having been stressed before, ever). Grand ideas for Spanish post-it notes on pots of Spanish hummus are being thrown around the front room like a ping-pong ball as I type.

We could set up communes in Italy!

Spain!

Greece!

And when we get bored of one place, we simply fly to the next! Like an exchange!

They clap hands excitedly one second, like children, and sip wine delicately the next. To me, it is like a complex, low-budget play where the audience must assume that an actor has changed character, despite not having a second costume to change into. Jon, half of the couple living in Spain, sporting peppered grey hair and a smart cowboy shirt, astoundingly tall, astoundingly good-looking, spits an olive pip into the ‘pip-oon’.

(He tells me on arriving, gosh, you have changed, running his eyes over me, assessing me, the hair and the baggy-jumper-and-silver-danglies combo. The way I look for escape, but finding none, stand demurely and look him back in the eye, not quite so demurely. How so, I want to know, and he says, why, you’re all grown up.)

You know the signs they have up on the sauna? Women only, men only, mixed? It’ll be like that!

Yes…yes! We’ll have our own Hansel and Gretel gingerbread house in the mountains of Spain, and being as disgraceful as we are, we’ll lure the sons of neighbours to visit, and have our wicked way with them…

…ways, someone else chimes in.

I attempt an escape. My father presses a glass of white wine into my one hand, pushes onto me an olive to take with the other.

…hot flushes… I hear, and I gather my mother is regaling the female guests with her Woe Of The Day. They laugh a lot amongst themselves, at the same time telling me to close my ears.

It’s not pleasant, they tell me, it’s like the other end of pregnancy.

The voluminous other-half-of-Spanish-couple woman, whose solidity and joie-de-vivre makes me feel good about myself (after having covertly watched her for several minutes - how she spread slightly along the sofa as she sat, her hand in the bowl of olives, the way Jon’s hands reach for her arm when he talks before snaking around her waist - just to make sure she really is happy and not just pretending) laughs uproariously, throwing her head back.

You know what will happen next? she says to my mother, You’ll find yourself driving at three in the morning to the garage a few miles down the road which sells EVERYTHING, open 24 hours, buying lard and eggs and flour and jam. You’ll get home, make twenty jam tarts, and eat EACH and EVERY one of them.

She nods at me and says, see, pregnancy all over again, as if I’d know.

Or you’ll buy healthy things, seeds, y’know, the ones actually meant for the bird-feeder, and you’ll make cookies and biscuits and cakes with them because the magazines say they’re good for you. The whole time you’ll be thinking, God, give me that glass of wine!, and you never quite get ’round to eating them.

Feeling adequately, and more so, equipped for what faces me in forty-odd years, I quashed her ‘what happens next’ theory by reminding her of my mother’s inability to drive.

She’d have to walk, I say, and get up to go.

We’re all laughing now, and my mother says when she can breathe again, If you still had that blog of yours, I know you’d run straight for the computer. I laugh and don’t tell her I got myself another one.