TEENAGE BOYS

I have two teenage sons, aged 18 and 20. They are charming and loveable and all that, but not all is sweetness and light in the Blotscher household.

1. They eat like crazy. No matter how often my wife and I fill it up, the most common refrain is "there is nothing in the fridge". Well, that's not really surprising, the way they go at it, before meals, after meals, during meals even. They are not at all fat, they just have a ginormous metabolic rate.

2. "There is nothing in the fridge" is in fact quite a long sentence, since for large parts of the day, they are monosyllabic or just communicate in grunts. It as if their digestive system has worked its way upwards and taken over their voicebox.

3. They sleep for incredibly long hours. Mornings at the weekend are out, afternoons are touch and go. "I'm so tired" is another long sentence. What do they expect, with all that eating?

All in all, I am reminded of the python outside the Tanzanian restaurant in Snakes As Pets (12/4/10). They mix long periods of docility with frenetic wriggling at feeding time.

4. The latest development is their sports kit. It STINKS. I thought that it was old men like me, who were supposed to smell. Handball jockstraps and box, ski underwear for football, socks like you wouldn't believe. Part of the problem comes from the fact that ...

5. The stuff lies in a kitbag in front of the front door, along with all of the other bags they don't put away in their rooms. By the time the kitbag is emptied and the contents put in the washing room, the clothes have mouldered away in a damp environment for days, weeks even, resulting in a swampy, sweaty smell that can be overpowering.

I said in Gylle (1/5/10) that I was getting used to the smell of pig slurry on the fields. Perhaps it is just the fact that the smell outside the house is less than the smell inside?

Walter Blotscher