Learner Dad: My wife has decided we should become The Waltons 

Cast of 'The Waltons', a hit TV drama set in rural Virginia during the Great Depression.

I think my wife might have fixed bedtime. It’s been a bit of a nightmare trying to get the kids to settle during this latest lockdown. For all the anxiety back in the first lockdown last year, at least the sun shone in April and May and all you needed was a trampoline to knock the taspy off your kids. (Taspy is my favourite bit of Cork slang because it rhymes with waspy, which is the way kids get at bedtime if they haven’t had enough exercise during the day.)

Taspy has been a problem this time around, with the trampoline off limits thanks to the weather . Our kids weren’t getting up early for school, so bedtime had slipped back to 8.30pm at the earliest. Then it would start. The calling us back into the bedroom for spurious reasons (you forgot to give me a hug/I need a glass of water/I think I have coronavirus).  I’m not going to pretend I was a nice person when it was my turn to go in an d tell them what would happen if they didn’t go to sleep . (Nothing really, we’re not great at following through.) The come-back-in demands from the kids would usually happen just as I was about to start horsing into my nightly half-packet of Custard Creams, and that didn’t help.