What happened to my empty nest? There I was poking about in all the nooks and crannies, planning what would be thrown out as soon as the daughters turned their backs on me, visions of a minimalist future dancing in my head like the proverbial Christmas sugar plums.

Life would enter a new phase, without all the essential stuff' that has been falling out of every cupboard if you so much as dare to disturb the air as you pass by.

How wrong I was. They are still here. Even the one who had gone, is back.Apparently she's having a crisis of confidence in her university career.

Having spent a few weeks living a topsy turvy life at the Edinburgh Festival, living by night and sleeping by day, acting, at about two in the morning, every day, in some obscure, but deeply original, translation of a Slovenian play about a man who drowns ducks for a living (or some such), she has now decided that there's more to life than sitting in lectures learning about works of literature that were written centuries ago.

She may have a point with the last bit. I can't think what good my literature degree has done me, apart from an ability to quote at the drop of a hat, but then in this city everyone can do that before they can walk.

But what I can't stomach is the fact that three weeks of quite extraordinarily abnormal existence (ie: the Edinburgh Festival) have apparently shown her what life is all about. As I write she is refusing to return to university and is saying she needs to take time out to think about her true direction.

Lord give me strength. I thought that was exactly what we went to university for.

She also suspects she has ME or glandular fever - ie: hasn't had enough sleep or eaten properly for the last two months - but won't go and see the doctor as she knows damn well that dear Doctor Cartwright won't believe her nonsense and will tell her to get some sleep and eat some vegetables.

Alicia, or Al' as she now has to be called in her post-festival persona, insists that there is something deeply wrong within her that can only be solved by lounging about the parental home with someone doing all the domestic stuff for her.

I must admit I am slightly worried by her receding name. When she went to university she went from Alicia to Alice, now Alice to Al. Where to go next but A'? Maybe she'll just disappear like the Cheshire Cat, along with her name.

You know I love them and all that, so that's why I can talk to you like this, but sometimes they are somewhat trying. I try to ignore the piles of dirty clothes that adorn my house and sit happily with my bowl of soup and newspaper at lunchtime, closing my ears to the wails of dismay about unwashed clothes and hunger.

As far as I am concerned, 20 years is plenty to learn how to wash your own clothes and heat your own soup.

I had foolishly only paced myself to last this long with two demanding daughters dictating my life. I didn't think to keep some reserves of patience in some shadowy corner of my psyche, in case they didn't go away after 20 years.

Margot - now known as Madge to all and sundry as far as I can make out, apparently some reference to Madonna since the hair went blonder - is less inclined to moon about the house and more intent on earning pots of money with which to head off to some exotic country.

Having achieved the required results - at her school that's about 15 A*s at A Level, while demonstrating an ability also to mop up after old ladies, defend one's country, heal the sick, construct economic policy, excel at hopscotch, jump through hoops and swing from the flying trapeze, while looking gorgeous all the while - she has her place at an art school in London, which had asked for a couple of reasonable A Levels and a sense of humour.

It seems that Madge's encounter last year with the boyfriend from Uzbekistan has given her a taste for the exotic. After the Florinko's attempt to marry her into the family and virtual kidnap, I'm amazed she wants to stray further than High Wycombe, although after the recent threats to aviation, maybe she's safer in the more unpronounceable countries of the Far East than High Wycombe.

Madge', as I must now call her, has a number of jobs, all of which she says are frighteningly underpaid, at upwards of £7 an hour, and all of which I have been doing unpaid for 20 years.

It is an odd thought that if I had hired myself out to cook, clean and babysit for others, I would have made a fortune by now, even once I had deducted the cost of someone else looking after the girls.

Madge says it is an outrage, and that I should never have done it to myself. Apparently women like me have been setting a bad example to the younger generation. She's never going to be caught in a trap like that. She's not going to be someone else's doormat, she's going to get out and live her own life and do what she wants to do.

Jolly good for the new Madge, I say. I just wish she and her sister would stop complaining that I don't wash, cook and clean for them any more now that I'm always out doing my painting, or yoga, or Italian. How can I be so selfish?

And how do I expect them to have time to do all those mundane chores when they're busy living their lives?

How indeed.