My days of sleeping on un-ironed pillowcases are over too

My mother is coming to visit us in our new house. She is determined to stay in a local hotel. The one with the nice marmalade.

“But I’ll get nice marmalade,” I say.

She’d prefer not to sleep in a building site, all the same thank you very much.

“But the building works are finished,” I say.

“Marvellous,” she says with magnificent distrust, “but the fact remains, my days of sleeping on un-ironed pillowcases are over too.”

I would like to know the dates of her visit, I say, but my mother turns deliberately and enthusiastically vague lest, god forbid, I start making up a bed with an un-ironed pillowcase.

“Don’t ask me,” she says, “I didn’t book the flights.”

My brother booked them, she says, and he’s in some godforsaken country at the moment. Syria she thinks, or Afghanistan, she can’t remember which one.

But my eldest daughter wants to book flights home from Edinburgh at the same time, I persist.

“She’s dying to see you,” I say.

“Wonderful,” she says, “what a treat. She can come and have breakfast in the hotel with me. We can chat all about Edinburgh. How is her life over there?”

“Full,” I say, “enjoys her course and loves her job, nice social life… bit of dating here and there but on the whole, when it comes to men, she sounds a bit… I don’t know-”

“Disaffected?” my mother says.

“Actually,” I say, “that’s exactly the right word.”

“And who’d blame her?” my mother asks, “disaffected is right. I mean I wouldn’t like to be dating nowadays, not with all this dreadful porn around.”

“I seem to remember you saying your generation could have done with a bit of porn,” I say, “to teach you the facts of life.”

“If I said any such thing, I was being flippant,” she says, “I mean honestly, bad enough that porn gives men all these gruesome ideas even if they kept them to themselves but chance would be a fine thing. Only the other day ***** told me about this dreadful chap who — ”

“Is ***** the woman I met the last time I was over with you,” I interrupt, “the one who said to me, “if you ever get tired of your mum, can I have her?”

“No,” my mother says, “that’s poor old **** — though now you mention **** — she came back from her most recent date with sun-starved Scandinavian, with her arm in a sling.

“A sling! Very controlling about food, she said. Imagine being told what you can and can’t eat.

“There was a tussle on the stairs, apparently, over nutrition, of all things. I mean I ask you.”

“So who’s this woman you’re talking about?” I say, “the one with the dreadful chap?”

“They all seem to have dreadful chaps,” she says, “she was a perfectly ordinary girl — charming looking thing — we just got chatting on Gyllinvase beach. Said she had to get rid of her boyfriend in the end.

“She said he was fine apart from the porn. He used to work away for long stretches and come back with all sorts of suggestions for her. She’d quake in her boots, she said.”

“I mean it’s not like it used to be,” she continues, “back in the day at least you could be sure neither of you had a clue in the bedroom — or if one of you did, well, it was a mercy, not a terrible tyranny.”

“I mean, reading between the lines,” she says darkly, “none of these suggestions were for anything any woman in their right mind would want to do. Even if you’d been with someone for a very long time and were completely deranged you’d think twice about some of them.

“I mean I’m all for people having a nice time together,” she says, “but gone are the days when you could get by with a bit of swinging from the chandeliers in a pair of saucy pants. Honestly, no wonder young women are disaffected. I’d be jolly disaffected.”

And we have come a long way from un-ironed pillow cases, I think.