What it's like having your 40-year-old son living at home again – mum's view

Dear Peter,

Before we start, your father and I would just like to thank you for allowing your piece to be published on his 74th birthday. We trust your fee will be paying for dinner. Your father is working in the greenhouse at the moment; I don't think he wants to talk to you. Your brother – a very successful veterinary surgeon – might be coming for dinner, by the way.

As for the rest of it, we're not sure where to start, as has been the case with you for a good 30 years now. I hope you have read the comments on the newspaper website and can now concede that a) a man of your age should not be wearing his jeans in such a way that we can see his underpants and a good inch of his bum cleft, and b) I was right all along about the eggs – when they're boiling, they're boiling; you don't need them to be bouncing and thrashing around like they're getting off with each other in a Jacuzzi.

The bottom line is, we know that you are beyond repair now, that those tattoos are not going to fall off overnight and that it's not within our rights to hold you down while you sleep and forcibly remove that ghastly beard. But the spare room, lest we forget, is our spare room; you just happen to be squatting in it, so when we go and find that it looks like someone has detonated a mini-bomb of spent underwear, empty Pepsi Max bottles and unsent CVs in there, we do feel we are within our rights to object. I see enough of your underpants looming up over the waistband of your jeans every day, I don't need to be picking them up off the floor as well. Likewise, we expect to go into the bathroom and not find the sink full of hair, not least because, if it's not coming from your face, then … Well, we don't want to know.

I hope you read all of the comments. There is some very good advice in there ("You should move to Denmark" was quite a good one, although we also rather liked "Are there no flats available in the area for this selfish git?"). Who knows, you may just listen to total strangers because you're certainly not listening to us. As it stands, though, at the time of writing, it is only 13 more days until you move into your new flat and I know that you are very excited about the move. Well, take that excitement, multiply it by two, throw in a vastly reduced grocery bill and one less slovenly ape-child, whose mess we have to clean up, moping around the house (in shorts and flip-flops) making it look untidy, and just imagine how thrilled we're going to be. And finally, stop swearing – you're supposed to be a writer.

With love,

Mum