While the cat's away the mice will ... well, you know what they'll do, don't you?

Parents contemplating a few days holiday without the kids (teenage kids that is) should certainly take note of these words of warning. Those left behind will be up to no good.

I speak from personal experience. Yes, I was once a teenager and later the mother of one.

So, in middle age, this old cat thought she knew it all but she had reckoned without the mice, or rather the mouse, still eager to play despite the grey whiskers.

"How's she been?" I asked a friend who'd been keeping an eye on The Mother for me while I was in Yorkshire.

It's not that I don't trust her (oh, all right, I don't), but the last time I went away The Mother, who is normally so nimble-footed, fell over in the back garden and gashed her hand.

She cut it so badly it needed stitches and neighbours told me there was a trail of blood through the kitchen and into the living room.

I was furious when she got round to telling me, which was three weeks later when I returned from America.

"Well, what could you have done?" she said and she had a point. At the exact time the accident happened I was 36,000ft over the Atlantic and I don't think a gashed hand, however impressive the blood loss, merits an airliner returning to base halfway through its flight.

Now, whenever I leave the house for a holiday or a weekend break, I have an unofficial body of Mother Sitters (friends, neighbours, the chap in the off-licence), to monitor the situation.

I say 'unofficial' because The Mother hates to think she's being watched, even if it is with the best of intentions.

"What do you think I am? An old woman?" she says crossly.

Well, yes, actually, I do, I feel like replying - but don't.

She certainly doesn't behave like a woman in her 80s.

When she gashed her hand last year she was up a ladder, pruning a tree, when she fell. On another occasion she was up a ladder painting the kitchen ceiling when she slipped. I'd been away for less than 24 hours.

"So," I said to my Mother Sitting friend, "she's not been on the roof or rebuilding the garden wall then?"

My friend laughed. "Not a bit of it," she said. "I've popped round most evenings and we've had a lovely time ... and I've put all the bottles in the bottle bank so everything is nice and tidy."

Excuse me? Did she say something about bottles and the bottle bank?

"What sort of bottles?" I asked.

Wine of course," said my friend. "Your mother's a very generous hostess. We killed quite a few bottles while you were away.

"And why not?" she added, obviously reading my mind. "As your mother kept reminding me, a glass of wine is very beneficial, particularly for people her age."

"A glass maybe," I said, "but a bottle ...?"

Later when my friend had gone I checked my wine cellar (okay, a wine rack under the stairs). It looked in urgent need of replenishment.

"I like it when you're not here, I enjoy myself," said The Mother.

"When are you planning to go away again ...?"

Welcome home, eh?