One of those combinations as clearly wrong and yet indefinably logical as a pickled egg in a packet of crisps

You may think, as so many of us with ageing ovaries and romantic notions of best-friend siblings seem to, that it would be a fantastic idea to have kids close in age; say, 2 or so years between the little lovelies.

And so it will come to pass that just as Little Angel #1 will be mastering the vagaries of potty training, so Little Angel#2 will be (quite literally) flexing his crawling muscles. And you will spend the majority of your waking hours vigorously directing one small child towards the potty and the other small child vigorously away from said potty. The joys know no bounds.

As for the pickled egg: When I was about 17, Sunday evenings were often spent with my BFF Alex, my favourite cousin, and his mates learning to play pool in a little pub in a forest, next to the river (that sounds like some kind of Brothers Grimm tale for teenagers, but you get the gist).

The Designated Snack of the evening was a pickled,hard-boiled-egg presented (I use the word lightly) in a packet of crisps - usually salt-n-vinegar flavour. The sharpness of the crisps perfectly offsets the blandness of the egg, and the beer washes it all down gloriously. Fuck knows how this became any kind of habitual bar snack, but it was tops. And of course now, twenty years on (Christ, we're getting old), on the rare-ish occasions I play pool, I think of Andrew, his gang, and the pickled eggs.