Colleen Smith

It’s turning into one of those ‘the sky is falling down’ kind of weeks.

I’m not sure if it’s just me and Chicken Licken, or if everybody gets overtaken by the same feeling of doom every now and again. It feels as if everything in your house is breaking down at the same time and you’ll never be able to sort it all out.

It started with me temporarily losing £400, and ended with my daughter pouring a litre of orange juice into her nearly new, beautiful Macbook.

Sadly I cannot tell you exactly what happened to the laptop. My daughter made me promise. She was so ashamed and upset by the depths of her own stupidity that it was several days before she could bring herself to speak about it, even to me. She has not told any of her friends and only told me on condition I tell no-one else. And the effort of keeping a funny story secret is nearly killing me. It goes against all my journalistic instincts.

All I can say is that we are not talking about a bit of a spillage, but the whole carton, upside down. The screen and keyboard were totally awash and the damage is irreparable.

The worst thing was that her dad — who gave her the Macbook to do her A-level coursework — was abroad on holiday when it happened. She had to wait 10 excruciating days to face him, own up and find out if he’d bought extra cover insurance for it. In the meantime, the prophets of doom kept telling her that you can’t insure mobiles and computers against spills.

On one hand I felt sorry for her obvious distress, and tried to reassure her that it would be OK. But on the other I was quite glad that she’d had to stew and think for a while.

Thankfully, her dad got back from holiday last night and is confident the damage will be covered.

And she is full of remorse and has made all sorts of promises about never, ever again, allowing liquids and computers into the same room. I think she’s learned a valuable life lesson.

It reminded me of one of a teenage issue encountered by one of my many cousins (have I ever told you that I’ve got 45 cousins on my mother’s side alone? My mum’s Irish, and one of 10, and all her siblings had big families, with the exception of one, who was widowed at an early age).

This particular cousin lived in one of those upside-down houses, with one bedroom down on the ground level. Which was fine, until her son, who slept in the downstairs room, grew into a teenager.

Suddenly, he and his friends were coming and going at all times. And no matter how many times they were told to lock the front door, it was frequently left unlocked all night.

Afraid that they would all be burgled, killed in their beds, or worse… my cousin and her husband came up with a cunning plan to teach their son a lesson.

While he was out one day, they staged a fake burglary and stripped his room of all valuables — guitar, stereo, computer. I’m not sure if they bothered pretending to mess it up because, being a teenager, he wouldn’t have been able to spot the difference. It probably looked tidier once they’d removed his stuff.

Anyway, they went to great lengths and hid everything in a friend’s garage and told their son that they’d informed the police, who’d said there was nothing they could do and that nothing was insured because the front door had been left unlocked…

He fell for it. And they kept up the charade for a couple of weeks, until they were sure that he’d finally accepted responsibility and started locking the door every night.

Anyway, enough about teenagers and their stupidity. They have excuses. Hormones and developing frontal cortexes. And coursework, exams, and too much alcohol and worries about university.

And now on to me, and my stupidity, and my hormones and my shrinking, ageing 50-year-old, pre-senile brain. And homework, housework, work work, too much alcohol and worries about university fees.

On Monday night I got home from work at the Herald and was cooking tea (when I say cooking, I mean putting a pizza in the oven) while two children were doing their homework in the kitchen and asking me for advice.

I was fine with the A-level English.

But my youngest son’s year four maths was beyond me. The mini-beasts were having a five-a-side football match. There were six-legged beetles, spiders with eight legs, centipedes and some other 40-legged creature. How many boots were involved, including substitutes, after a gang of lizards and an angry referee had devoured some of the players?

By this time my daughter had moved on from coursework to filling in a financial assistance application form for university.

I’d been speaking to a friend whose husband is something big in the city. She doesn’t work and has only one teenager. She was bemoaning the fact that she’s injured her leg and can’t play tennis at the moment. When I asked if she gets bored, she said that no, she had lots to do, sorting out her daughter’s university application.

I wasn’t sure whether to feel jealous or guilty. My daughter’s done it all by herself. Apart from a few long chats, and driving her to have a look at a couple of campuses, I’m afraid she’s been on her own.

So I should have been happy to be helpful when she was trying to fill in the form. But it was all too much — what with the referee eating three beetles’ legs (that’s minus 18 pairs of boots) and all. I was hungry and tired and all I wanted was to eat my pizza in peace, and listen to The Archers (Brian’s been at it again), and have a nice cup of tea.

Plus I was fed up with online applications. That’s how I lost £400. Temporarily.

I was wondering why I was suddenly so hard up at the end of last month. I thought it was the double birthday celebration.

But actually, I’ve just discovered, I’ve accidentally bought two tickets for Glastonbury. Which is good news, really.

I’ve never been to Glastonbury and so I’d registered, and sent off my passport photo, which everybody had to do this year before applying for tickets. But then I’d missed out on getting around to buy a ticket and they were all sold out.

Then, at the beginning of April, I had an email to say that a few last tickets were available online one Sunday morning at 9am. I tried. But I didn’t know that Michael Eavis only takes debit cards, not credit cards, and I was swearing at the computer and not understanding what the problem was.

Eventually the computer crashed and I gave up.

So it wasn’t until this week’s bank statement arrived that I saw the card payment was successful and realised where all my money had gone.

I was about to say I must get some new wellies, but writing this column has been therapeutic and my dark cloud of Chicken Licken gloom has drifted away… it’s going to be the sunniest Glastonbury ever.

The Herald Express story about Brixham butler Gary Lindley, who asked a court to remove his electronic tag and curfew so that he could go to work at Lady Arran’s Devon castle, has been all around the world since we first published it earlier this week.

Lady Arran said Gary makes the best scrambled eggs and it has sparked a huge online debate in The Guardian about how to get your eggs soft and fluffy (or rich and creamy, depending on your preference).

This morning there were 56 different suggestions (with a few people deviating into the area of black magic and witchcraft which is needed to get a perfectly poached egg).

My favourite recipe comes from online contributor GenghisKong, who says he eats this every morning, and it makes him a happy man. I think he may drop dead of a heart attack if he really eats that much cholesterol daily, but at least he’s happy.

Genghis’ scrambled eggs:

finely chop a couple of spring onions

thoroughly beat together three to four eggs with a glug of milk and plenty of black pepper

soften a knob of butter (as large as you like) in a small, heavy-bottomed saucepan and briefly fry the spring onions over a medium heat

reduce the heat to very low and add the eggs, stir constantly over as low a heat as you have the patience for

when the eggs are nearly done (starting to thicken, but still slightly liquid) put a thick slice of bread in the toaster

butter the toast generously

eggs should be about done by now. Take them off the heat and add a pinch of salt and some fresh thyme.

give them one last stir and pour them over the toast

devour, but don’t think about the butter, calories or cholesterol.

It would be nice to know how Gary cooks his.

THIS week I have been driving around Torquay trying to find the oldest cash machine.

And once I’ve worked out which one it is (there’s one in Union Street which looks decidedly decrepit) all I have to do is quickly spend this month’s wages, get nicely overdrawn, and then the world’s my oyster.

I’ve been trying to put myself in the shoes of Joanne and Darren Jones, the couple who discovered their withdrawals from the hole in the wall were not showing up on their account.

In the next 88 days they made 300 visits and withdrew more than £60,000 from the faulty Waitrose cash machine in their home town.

This week a court heard it happened because the machine was very old and failed to record the transactions properly, so didn’t show people had taken more money out if they were already overdrawn.

The prosecutor said very few other people benefited from the free payouts because a majority of people in Billericay were not overdrawn. Yeah, right.

Is Billericay the one place in the country to be blessed with economic good health?

I’m thinking the Joneses were caught because they were particularly greedy. But I bet there are an awful lot of other people keeping very quiet. Isn’t it possible some people just didn’t notice that their overdraft was £50 or £100 better off than they’d guessed?

Or maybe, if others cottoned on, they were too scaredy cat to withdraw more than a little something for the weekend every now and again?

I had Radio 2 on in the car as I was driving around this week and there was the usual rabid phone-in discussion on the subject. Listeners were divided into two distinct camps — the bank haters and the goody two shoes.

The bank haters had all been playing too much Monopoly and really believed that card which says something like ‘bank errors in your favour — receive £50′.

The goody two shoes all insisted they would immediately have given the money back.

Personally, I’m not so sure what I would have done.

First of all I suspect I wouldn’t notice for a while. I don’t always use the same cash machine, and usually only take £50 out. And I know I should keep a running balance on my account, but I don’t.

It was different for Joanne Jones because she’s a banker herself (a team leader for the Northern Trust Bank in London, and lost her job after pleading guilty to the theft). Not only did she spot what was happening, but she realised why.

She had discovered in March last year the faulty cash machine paid out cash even though she was more than £1,000 overdrawn, and it did not appear on her HSBC statement.

She got her husband to help her withdraw more money using her account and a joint account, which had originally been in credit.

The couple were making daily visits to the cash machine and once took out £1,250 in just five minutes and £2,400 in 10 minutes on another day, the court heard.

If I noticed money wasn’t coming out of my account whenever I visited the cash machine at my local Co-op, I’d be in a terrible stew.

What if I told the bank? What if they discovered the mistake had been happening for years? How would I know how much money I’d taken out from that machine, if it’s not been showing up on my statements?

What if it was thousands? How would I pay them back? I’d lie awake at night sweating about losing the house, my job, the children. We’d all be doomed. The end of the world would be well nigh.

So would I own up, or keep quiet?

And if I kept quiet, just imagine the guilt and the torture. How tempting would it be to sneak back to that one magical money machine every now and again, just to see if it still worked?

Imagine the temptation when money’s tight at Christmas, for example. Or just before pay day when funds are low. How strong would you need to be to resist free money spewing out of a hole in the wall?

When I was discussing the moral dilemma, one friend suggested, as it was the bank’s mistake, the couple could have kept all the money in a savings account and then handed it back, minus the interest.

I laughed. What interest? At today’s rates that would have been about £1.23. And, technically, wouldn’t they still have been guilty of theft?

The judge said the Joneses lived a fairytale lifestyle with their money, buying designer clothes, staying at a luxury hotel and putting down a cash deposit for a Chrysler Crossfire sports car.

The detail of the court story which made me laugh was that the police also found £27,340 in cash in the couple’s kitchen, put into various envelopes, marked ‘holiday money’, ‘car money’, ‘clothes money’, ‘kitchen money’ and ‘baby money’. I suppose it made them feel slightly less criminal than ’stolen money’ or ’swag’.

I couldn’t work out why they put down a deposit on a car. I suppose they thought they’d draw attention to themselves by buying it outright, like the great train robbers.

And while we’re talking about banks and car loans, I must tell a story by way of warning to parents of teenagers.

Friends of mine went on a ski holiday recently, and while they were away their 19-year-old son walked into a car showroom and bought a £25,000 sports car on credit. Just like that.

They came back to find the shiny new white car on their driveway and had apoplexy because their son is only earning £400 to £600 a month washing dishes while he decides what to do with his life after A-levels.

The loan repayments on the car are £550 a month.

He’d gone in to discuss buying a second-hand car but had been convinced that a nice new one was a better deal.

Apparently, he had to produce no proof of earnings. And the salesman ticked a box on the credit agreement which said that his job was professional.

And because he’s over 18, he’s officially an adult (even though everybody knows teenagers’ brains are temporarily a hormonal mush).

My livid friends immediately marched son and car back to the showroom. And what has made them even more angry is the discovery that the usual cooling-off period on credit agreements does not apply if you sign while in the showroom.

Now the dealers say they want £2,000 because that’s how much the car has been devalued by being driven off the forecourt. My friends and their penniless son are in negotiations.

I’ve also learned that white cars are always the ones dealers can’t wait to shift. They show the dirt too much, and most sensible people want dark, metallic shades.

I’M ABOUT to join Madonna, Michael Jackson, Barbie and Paddington Bear.

In case you didn’t spot the connection, they’ve all recently turned 50, and I’m now planning my 50th birthday party, with some trepidation.

It’s not that I mind being 50. When I compare myself with my famous contemporaries, I can’t help thinking that I’m not doing too badly.

Paddington and I are handling the ageing process gracefully: a little hairier, a little greyer, but without the use of plastics, whiteners or any other surgical procedures. Mentally, neither of us were exactly sharp to start with, so it’s hard to know what’s senility and what’s just our normal day-to-day confusion. But I’m starting to think that keeping sandwiches under my hat, always carrying a packed suitcase and hanging a label around my neck are rather sensible precautions against early onset dementia.

Madonna’s doing her Peter Pan thing and is still looking and sounding great. I’ve always admired her ability to adapt and reinvent herself.

But I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes right now. She may be taking the whole Madonna and child thing too far: what with the bit-too-young-not-to-be-creepy 22-year-old lover, and her quest to adopt a daughter in Malawi.

Instead of battling so hard against nature, I’d like to see Madonna becoming a new kind of role model for our generation of women by relaxing into middle age with something approaching wisdom. I know Madonna purposely uses her ability to shock as a way to challenge prejudices, and that’s what she may be doing right now: why can’t women go on being parents (like men do), even after their biological clocks stop ticking? And why can’t older women take beautiful young lovers (like men do)?

I get all that. But rather than being shocking, this time I’m worried she’s just fallen into the biggest stereotype of all and she’s having just another, boring, post-divorce, mid-life crisis (like men do).

I’d much rather she’d use her talent for reinvention by accepting nature’s own changing process and going with the flow of this mid-life, menopausal stage. Take it from me, it’s not such a big deal.

As for Barbie, she’s been the one woman of my generation who has genuinely broken the glass ceiling and had it all: babies, careers, the Presidency and Ken. Obviously, when it comes to the issue of plastic, Barbie had a head start. And unlike Jacko, whose surgical procedures had horrifying consequences, Barbie will forever escape the laws of cause and effect and gravity.

Barbie’s impressive FF cup size boobs remain just as pert and perky as they were in 1959. In reality we all know that a woman shaped like Barbie would be 7ft 2in tall and have to crawl on all fours because of her enormous chest and tiny feet (someone’s also worked out that she’d only have half a liver and four inches of intestine because of her ridiculously small waist).

So, as I was saying earlier, my trepidation is not about wrinkles and decay. It’s just I rashly announced I was going to have a party, and now realise I ought to be doing more about it than vaguely mentioning it in passing whenever I bump into someone I know.

So far I think I’ve done that to about 200 people and I can’t decide whether that’s a recipe for an incredibly good party or a total ‘party from hell’ disaster.

I’m trying to be outwardly all ‘Zen and the Art of Party Planning’. That worked brilliantly last year when I didn’t do anything at all and ended up having one of my best birthdays ever.

Part of my problem is that I gave birth to my youngest child on my birthday and so the last eight years have been great. There are not many adults who can legitimately lay on egg sandwiches, marshmallows, things on sticks and jammie dodgers every year throughout their 40s.

Last year I took a bunch of little boys to play Quasar Laser and I got told off for taking it too seriously and scaring children when I jumped them from above, screaming, with my face blacked like Rambo.

It wouldn’t have been so bad, but my son’s best friend had a bad neck, so they both sat outside quietly discussing the meaning of life while I ran around terrorising the rest of his school friends. It was the best fun I’d had in years.

In the evening I’d planned to meet a couple of friends for a sophisticated, early evening cocktail or two, and then home early to bed.

In fact, loads of people turned up. I was still hyper from playing Rambo and the e-numbers in the children’s party food. Plus I discovered a passion for Long Island Iced Tea. Do you know there’s no tea at all in those things?

It was fun and I was asleep by 10, though sadly I was still in the cocktail bar and not at home in bed.

But back to this year. Inwardly, the idea of being in charge of a proper grown-up party terrifies me.

Does that mean I have to sit down and start writing lists?

Also (seeing as I’m nearly 50 and approaching senility), I don’t know who I’ve invited and who I’ve forgotten.

I know this is going to seem incredibly lazy and disorganised but who cares, (lazy and disorganised are recurring themes in my life, alongside ‘bad mother’ and ‘nutty veggie woman’).

So here goes: This is an official invite to anybody who knows me, who I’ve not seen in the last couple of months — Party, My house, Next Saturday.

Sorted.

My daughter and I have just had a discussion about whether my party is in fact next Saturday or the Saturday after next.

In my view this Saturday is this Saturday and next Saturday is next Saturday and it’s clear. But there are people who say next Saturday when they mean this Saturday. So just to be sure nobody turns up on the wrong day, my party is not this this Saturday. It’s definitely next next Saturday. And it’s not the Saturday after next.

Now I think all I have to do is blow up the balloons, wrap a pass the parcel with 200-plus layers and get a fire extinguisher for all those candles. See you there (or should that be here?).