Terry arrived home hoping for a peaceful evening.

Angela carefully prepared dinner, peeling tomatoes to fry with garlic, onions and pinches of marjoram and ground black pepper in good olive oil; thinly slicing courgettes, leeks, sausages and bananas; putting spinach and peas in the steamer and then the blender. The stew turned out as always with the colour, texture and odour of pond scum.

         Keith ate his with vigour and vile slurping noises. Terry, with incipient nausea, waited till Angela was ladling out her bowl-full to swing sideways and quickly lower his own to Flotsam who, at least, was silently greedy. Sitting opposite him at the shiny-topped table Denise spooned up hers and asked for more. “Christ!” thought Terry, “But I suppose she has had something more disgusting in her mouth.”

After pudding, a strange fruit pie with an accidental hint of Marmite, as evening ennui began to threaten, Angela passed round the biscuits. Her eyes wandered over the mantelpiece and the autographed picture, inherited from Terry’s father, of Winston Churchill, cigar tilted and making a two fingered victory sign. She brightly announced: “I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with . . V !”

“Voluptuous”, smirked Keith at Denise. “Venereal disease”, said Terry, looking pointedly at his son. “Vicious”, trilled Denise. Angela smiled round at them vaguely: “Van Gogh?”

“Vapid and vacuous”, groaned Terry.