My multi-culti Waltons household swells further

IN order to write another book without the aid of an advance, and to raise expensive children without the aid of a co-parent, my household is stuffed with paying guests, and is starting to resemble a United Colours of Benetton advert. Except scruffier.

The latest on the palette arrive shivering from Panama City, with expensive luggage and no English. It is as though Bambi and her sister have turned up on the doorstep, utterly bewildered, having never left Panama before. “Where’s Panama?” ask my expensive children.

“Hats, cigars, canal – Google it,” I tell them.

I have no time for further explanation. These latest guests – students at the nearby posh language school adept at attracting rich foreign parents keen to part with their money — are destined to be more high maintenance than the Lithuanian in the spare room, who is now so much part of the family that his mother and I, who have never met, because I have never been to her village on the Lithuanian-Belarus border, regularly exchange gifts via her son. Last time she sent me a silver pen, because he told her I am a writer. Which I would love to be, when I am not flapping around like a bat in a cowshed attending to children, dogs, lodgers, and now students.

“What do you eat in Panama?” I ask the new students, who stare at me with their huge Bambi eyes, wrapped in layers of winter clothes. The school says I must speak to them in English, but we are getting nowhere.

We communicate on the most crucial issues – Wifi and dinner. Despite looking like they have stepped from an glossy hair advert, it transpires the Bambis like junk food. Fried chicken and Gummi Bears. I drive to the nearest cheap German supermarket, and load up with cheap German chicken, the stuff I usually get for the dogs. And loads of cheap German sweets.

My children’s eyes light up. Has Wholefood Vegan Mummy finally come to her senses? “No!” I snap. “This is what they eat in Panama.”

“No it’s not,” says the 13-year-old. “I Googled it.” But I have no time for such discussions on international cuisine. I divide the cheap German chicken between the students and the dogs, and make something healthy and vegetarian for our own dinner. My children glare at their plates mutinously. I give up. Soon everyone except me is eating cheap German chicken and Gummi Bears.

Later, I do a headcount. The household resembles a kind of multi-culti Waltons comprising of Spanish Boyfriend, Irish Mummy, British Asian / Irish kids, German dogs, Lithuanian lodger, and Panamanian Bambis. “Buenas noches, Jim Bob,” I shout at bed time, but nobody gets it. Except me, obviously.