Home is where the ... hassle is

After six hours on Megabus, with no leg room, air conditioning and a toilet that I presume, given the odour, was not working, I pulled into an attitude-packed Manchester at the 11th hour.

A bowl of chicken soup later, I was in bed and waking up to the Jewish New Year. My brother and mother had gone to synagogue to bitch about how religious the rabbi was for a traditional congregation and to chat with people in the lobby. I went for a walk with my father, whose conversation skills have deteriorated to 3 words an hour, and those three are not audible. The afternoon was a rollercoaster of emotion as my mother asked us why we were so distant from her? So we told her EVERYTHING about her negativity, depression, attitude. She cried. Mark and I made a pact in front of her that we would not call or visit until they had done one new thing each week. Snakes on a Plane is the first planned activity. If orders are followed until May, they get a weekend in Paris. We will have to go to on account of their stupidity and ability to say "Prolly Vous Francais", which my mother thinks gives her "conversational French". Mark's emotions went up and down as Bury twice surrendered a lead against 10-man Barnet and mine went up and down in the evening, following many a gin and tonic chez 25-year school friend Simon and Lindsay. Sunday pitched me with my cousin Lynda, who has just defeated breast cancer, briefly with her parents - the one and only Uncle Alan (my dad's older brother) and his wife, the toothless, forever-complaining-about-her-bad-back Shirley, who likes to compete on the "keeping in touch with family" stakes. Even though no one keeps in touch with her. How are you Aunty Shirl told me she had a very bad cold, a streaming cold, one of the worst she had ever had.

As evening approached, my grumpy brother Mark drove home at 110 mph, flying down the motorway, only moving from the outside lane for a speeding ambulance, in a successful bid to get his friend on the last evening train from Coventry to Reading. When we pulled into the station in the Midlands, the G Force stopped and his friend flew at the train doors with 12 seconds to spare. When I got home, I mistakenly became glued to Texas Chainsaw Massacre and old leather head, whose penchant for hooks and saws left me unable to sleep and dreaming of National Express. Mission over. Three months till the next.