Hole in ozone layer as spraying son runs amok

WITH pocket money sent from well meaning relatives comes a degree of financial independence which does not always translate quite as smoothly from its theory of giving to the reality of spending as one might hope. I call it the Lynx Effect. Give a ten-year-old boy a bus fare, access to cash, and a trip into town with his mates, and you are asking for trouble.

Not the kind of trouble that involves coming home in the back of a police car — we are not there yet, although I remain confident that it is only a matter of time — but the kind of trouble that involves walking into his room the next day and straight into a eye-stinging, nostril-inflaming cloud of body spray that makes you rush for the nearest window to fling it open.

“Jog on, mother,” he says, when you suggest that the hole in the ozone layer now hovers directly above our house, as well as mobilising all the boy cats in the neighbourhood, attracted by the powerful scent emanating from number 137. He sprays and sprays, as you gag, hand clamped over mouth.