“The rules are no pulling faces, no sounds, no looking away and no shutting eyes”

SUNDAY. 1.30am.

We return home from my daughter’s admission to hospital. “One-thirty in the morning,” my husband states, as we carry the luggage upstairs, “is way too late to unpack.”

He drops our bags at the top of the stairs and about-faces.

“Where are you off to?” I ask.

“The kitchen,” he says, taking the stairs two at a time, “to make some toast. Want some?”

Ten minutes later, after I’ve harassed my daughter off her phone and into bed, I hear him switch on the television.

He’s turned the volume down very low; in large part, I consider, to avoid disturbing our daughter’s sleep but in small part, to spare me the trouble of wondering how one o’clock in the morning can be way too late to unpack but not way too late to watch Match of the Day.

2.30am.

Having unpacked my bag I’m now in bed trying to find homes for some of the other stuff I took with me to hospital.

I mean it’s easy to dump washing in the laundry basket and admission forms in the bin. But I’m not sure how to dump the fear. Or the worry. Or the decisions. Or the totally fearsome bloody mindedness that you need to bring to hospital, just in case of emergencies. It’s like someone’s put them all into a balloon and blown it up inside my head.

Monday, 7.45am.

I wake up my husband to tell him about the balloon in my head; it’s still there and I wonder if he might say something to deflate it. He’s good at that.

“Give yourself time,” my husband says, “you should take...”

“If you say, ‘take each day’ to me I’ll kill you,” I interrupt. “I will kill anyone who ever says that to me ever again.”

It seems there’s still a lot of fearsome bloody-mindedness in that balloon.

“I was going to say you should take the dog to the beach this morning,” he says, looking put-out.

8.45pm.

Now we all have the same balloons in our heads.

We need to pop these balloons but don’t know how, right now. They just sit there, all blown up in our heads, even though my husband has lit a fire, and we are road-testing our new Sky TV package in front of it, with tea and toast for extra comfort.

9pm.

Two friends turn up. Jamin is 20, and his sister Saffron, is 17. Both are mad as bikes but in the best possible way.

“Let’s watch Embarrassing Bodies,” Saffron says, sitting down. We all protest in loud, sqeamish revulsion.

“Oh come on,” she says, “it’ll be fun. I love it. It always makes me feel soooo relieved to be me.”

I can feel the balloon deflate in my head just a tiny little bit.

“Let’s play ‘who can watch it without screaming or turning away’,” I say. “The one who can do it for longest wins.”

We watch Dr Christian Jenssen forage around underneath a massive, pendulous flap of stomach fat in order to locate genitals which belong to a very fat man suffering from erectile dysfunction. Dr Christian looks for these genitals for a long time. Eventually he finds them stuck fast between thighs which are covered in pustular little sores.

Saffron points straight at me. “You’re out!” she accuses.

“I didn’t make a single sound,” I protest, “and I didn’t turn away.”

“You were pulling faces,” she says, “and you shut your eyes. I saw.”

“No-one said anything about not pulling faces,” I say, all up on my dignity now.

We re-establish rules; no pulling faces, no sounds, no looking away, no shutting eyes.

We watch more genital foraging. Jamin goes out first. My husband goes out next; done over by a close up shot of a female beard. My daughter spooks like a horse at a jump when the camera finally closes in on the fat man’s genitals.

Then I go out when Dr Jenssen starts poking the pendulous flap.

Saffy wins. She is laughing her head off. So is my daughter.

And our balloons pop. Just like that.