Mummy's new boyfriend

I acquired three teenage daughters on Christmas Eve, as the triplets turned thirteen. Melanie is the stroppiest by far, but we only had one spat, when, last night, she repeatedly told me to "shut up", after her frustration that I couldn't repair their computer immediately escalated into a demand for a new one.

"Don't you tell me to shut up, you ungrateful sod," I snapped, pleased to see unexpected bits of spit landing on the carpet between us despite the absence of plosive consonants in what I was saying. "All the money your mother and me have spent on you and now you want a new computer? Stop being so thirteen."

"Thh-ett-teen," she forehanded back, making fun of my pronunciation. Parental love is unconditional, Melanie. It won't work.

Aside from this, it was all warmly domestic, even down to the cat pissing in the front room and filling it with an acrid smell. Kirsty disappeared for a couple of days to have sex with someone taller, better looking, and wealthier than me in the Lake District while the girls and I luxuriated in an excess of Boursin, chocolate and Amontillado.

My daughters all wanted a taste of the latter, a request I was pleased to indulge, as I would consider myself a success as a father if, in five years' time, I overheard a daughter of mine at the bar saying "Have you got a very dry Amontillado?" If, on the other hand, I saw them fiddling with straws inserted into bottles containing liquids in colours that do not appear in nature, no amount of subsequent success in their stated careers of archaeologist, actress and tramp (sic - that's what Melanie once said she wants to be) would assuage a sense of paternal failure.

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Mr Tall is playing the difficult role of Mummy's New Boyfriend in an admirably low key way that indicates that he is not attempting to replace their father in that rôle. And he's put much better music on her iPod. He's into poppy dance music - Black Box, Stone Roses, Prodigy, that sort of thing - which is a blessed relief after the Guantanamo Bay torture of Van Morrison that she used to play endlessly. As we put the Christmas dinner together we danced around the kitchen to Firestarter. "Look, Melanie," she shouted through to the living room. "You've got modern parents."

Bit of a test coming up in 4 hours and 10 minutes: I'm meeting Denise in the Sun. I might have described her in a text as "cock-stiffeningly gorgeous", situating this in the context of the fingertip-excitingly sexy mauve wrap-round miniskirt she wore last time we met, which splits up her thigh as she crosses her legs, and she might have replied "Well, you might be in luck, looby. That's one of the things I've packed for my trip to Lancaster."

In news of seasonal joyousness, a payment I'm due might be coming through a bit early because of the way New Year falls, which holds out the delicious possibility of me being at the Lytham Soul Weekender, and spending a weekend acquiring blisters dancing to my first and most enduring musical love, Modern Soul.