The Relative Importance Of Germaine Greer, Budget Cuts And Designer Clothes. Oh, And Of Life Itself.

So now Josh seems to have become a direct victim of the cuts. And I am sick of spending weekends in A&E.

"Do you have to go out tonight?" I say to him, as he leaves the house last night. "It's always on Saturday nights that you seem to get beaten up on your way home from the pub."

"I know," says Josh, gloomily. "That's why I'm not going there. I'm going round to Robbie's instead - on my new bike."

I get a sinking feeling I decide to ignore. I'd never make an elementary mistake like that at work.

"Kiss your mother before you go," I say.

"Can't," says Josh. "According to Germaine Greer, that would be teaching me to flirt with you."

"I think she was only referring to little girls kissing their fathers," I say.

"Then she was being sexist, too," says Josh. "As well as an idiot."

On that probably indisputable note, off he rides, into the sunset. Thank God he's never seen Greer's Beautiful Boy book. I can only imagine what he'd say about that.

All this talk of flirting makes me wonder whether Max will still be awake after Wallander has finished. He looks pretty alert, so I decide it's safe to wait until the programme's over, before making any flirtatious moves. This proves to be ill-advised.

We've just gone to bed, and I'm about to commence a preliminary manoeuvre, when the doorbell starts to ring. It doesn't stop until I get downstairs and open the door.

"Mrs Bennett?" says Robbie. "I don't want you to panic -"

Only a teenager would think that that would have the desired effect.

"What's happened?" I say, as clearly as I can, given that my chest doesn't seem to be expanding quite enough to let in any air.

"Josh has had a bit of an accident," says Robbie, glancing sideways down the street. "But - "

I don't wait for the rest of the sentence. I run into the road and look for Josh. There's no sign of him, anywhere.

"Where is he?" I say to Robbie, who looks very pale, now I come to think of it.

"At the hospital," he says.

Oh. Right. Thank God for that. If Josh has managed to cycle to the hospital, he can't be too badly injured, can he? I calm down slightly, and take the deepest breath I've managed since opening the door.

"I've brought his bike back for him," says Robbie, freaking me out all over again.

"So how the hell did he get to the hospital?" I say.

"Um," says Robbie. "Well, someone called an ambulance."

"Was he knocked out?" says Max, who's walking down the stairs, while doing his flies up at the same time.

"Yes," says Robbie. "And he was bleeding quite a lot, too."

I have no idea what happens to Robbie after that. Or to Josh's bike. I just grab the car keys and my handbag, push past him, and run towards the car. Max isn't far behind.

The journey to the hospital seems to take forever, even though we're going so fast. Max is driving, and for once, I don't say anything about his white van man approach to roundabouts. I'd be quite happy for him to drive straight across the damn things if it got me to my son any quicker.

You can tell how scared we both are, because we don't actually speak to each other at all.

"Our son's been brought in by ambulance," says Max to the receptionist in A&E. "Joshua Bennett. He fell off his bike."

"Oh, yes," she says, without needing to look anything up at all - so now I'm really terrified. "Through those doors, and second left."

As we rush along the corridor, a door opens up ahead, and a nurse wheels a bed across our path and into another room. I'm pretty sure that Max also notices that there's a patient in it, covered in drips and wearing a neck collar, though he doesn't mention it.

"Where's Josh Bennett?" he says to a passing doctor, who doesn't seem to hear, so Max repeats the question at the top of his voice.

"He's in here," comes a voice from behind a half-drawn curtain, and there, slumped on a trolley but thankfully not wearing a neck collar, is Josh. Or, at least, I think it's Josh. His head is so swathed in bandages, and his face so cut up, that I can hardly tell.

He gives me an apologetic look out of the one eye that isn't covered by the bandage, as the nurse says,

"Oh, we got that done just in time - didn't we, Josh?"

Josh murmurs in agreement, and then the nurse continues:

"He begged us to clean him up before you saw him."

"This is cleaned up?" says Max, giving me a sidelong glance.

I know exactly what he means. Josh is absolutely covered in blood. I bend over to kiss him on the cheek, but then realise that this isn't going to be as easy as it sounds, so I take his hand and squeeze it, instead.

"Ow," says Josh, at which point I spot the cuts and grazes on his hands.

"What the hell happened?" says Max. "Have you been drinking?"

"No," says Josh. "It was the surface of the road. I hit a sunken drain cover on Park Street, which jerked the wheel round, and then I couldn't get control of the bike, because I hit another row of drains straight afterwards. The last thing I remember is thinking, 'Oh, shit,' and heading over the handlebars."

"Bloody hell," says Max. "I know the drain covers you mean. They feel really bad, even in the car. And they've had yellow markings round them for months, so they should have been repaired by now."

He pauses while the nurse takes Josh's blood pressure, then carries on:

"I bet it's down to this government's sodding budget cuts."

Honestly, sometimes Max sounds just like a usual suspect. The only cut I'm worried about right now is the one that's still bleeding through Josh's bandages.

"Never mind that," I say. "How do you feel, Josh? Are you okay?"

"No," he says. "Look at this blood all over my new Stussy shirt, and on my shoes and jeans. How am I going to get that out?"

Honestly, talk about the warped priorities of the male of the species. First Max rants on about government policy; and then Josh is more worried about clothing than his injuries.

Mind you, I'm a bit worried about the cuts myself, on second thoughts. Maybe they might account for why the hospital seems so reluctant to x-ray Josh's head - unless they've decided there's no brain inside it to be damaged.

Skinny Jeans, Neighbourly Behaviour & An Apparent Inability To Use The Phone

I am knackered after last night's stint in Casualty, though I'd really like some of their zero tolerance posters for use in the office. We could exclude at least a quarter of constituents if we implemented something similar.

Tolerance is in short supply at home today, though I'm not sure who is the grumpiest: me or Josh. He's disgusted that he has to wear a brace to support his kneecap, particularly as it won't fit under his skinny jeans.

"I don't know what you're moaning about," I say. "Wearing them was probably what caused your kneecap to dislocate in the first place. They're ridiculously tight."

"Don't be stupid, Mum," he says. "They're probably better than a brace - seeing as they cover the whole leg."

"Well, if you don't do as the doctor told you, and it dislocates again over the weekend, you'll have to hop to the hospital. I can't afford any more bloody taxis."

Max looks very uncomfortable when I say this, but he still hasn't volunteered how Ellen happens to have been lent our car without me even knowing about it. He always leaves it to me to broach contentious subjects.

It turns out that her car has broken down, and that Max offered to lend her ours so she could visit her mother this weekend.

"But why didn't you consult me first?" I say. "It is our car, after all. And I am your wife - or I was, the last time I looked."

"There wasn't time," he says. "Ellen was supposed to get to a family party by 8:00pm, and didn't realise her car was buggered until nearly 5:30pm. You weren't even home, so I couldn't ask you first."

"Ever heard of Alexander F*cking Graham Bell?" I say.

Max glares at me, before deciding to go on the offensive.

"I knew you'd be awkward about it if I asked you, anyway," he says. "I was just trying to be neighbourly."

"Being husbandly would make a nice change."

Josh says, "Oooh!" which doesn't help at all, so I stomp off into the living room.

Walking out of the house would have been preferable, but I'd be bound to bugger over in the snow and ruin my dramatic exit. There must be another way to make the same point, given some creative thinking.

I turn on the TV for inspiration. Sod my rule about never watching it in the daytime to avoid brain death: this is an emergency. Max must be able to hear it, because he comes into the room, and makes himself comfortable on the sofa. Some people just can't take a hint, can they?

When I press Play on an old recording of an episode of Swedish Wallander, he gets up and walks out again.

"Bloody subtitles," he says.

Now he knows how it feels to have trouble working out what the hell is going on.

An Unexpected Side-Effect of Wallander. The Swedish Version, Of Course.

Oops, I seem to have accidentally had sex last night. With Max. This doesn't feel like it was a very good idea in the cold light of day, not with my meeting with Johnny set for tomorrow.

I wanted to be in a fever of sexual frustration to justify even thinking about having an affair, not absurdly satisfied and able to recall with rather too much clarity just how good at the whole business Max is, albeit only when there's nothing more appealing on the television. Now I'm a bundle of nerves, all wrapped up with jittery guilt, and I haven't even done anything to feel guilty about. Yet. Talk about awful timing.

Most of the blame lies with the television, actually - or with the schedulers, anyway. If that wretched Ultimate Big Brother hadn't still been dominating Max's otherwise-beloved Channel 4, and if Josh hadn't been out for the night, I wouldn't have dared to suggest that we watch the Swedish* version of Wallander, and nothing would have happened. But UBB is on, Josh is out, and Max detests subtitles, so although he goes along with my idea, he falls asleep five minutes after the programme starts, while pretending that he hasn't.

This procedure - at which he is an expert - involves waking periodically, and saying 'Yeah," or "Hmmm," as if he's genuinely engrossed in what he's (not) watching, but it never fools me, even though I always humour him by pretending that it does. At least, I usually play along until he starts snoring, at which point I can't even hear the TV, so I have to resort to nudging him, hard. Then he gets stroppy and denies that he was asleep in the first place. It's very irritating.

So last night, I decide to try out a new technique, recommended recently by Josh, who tells me that it works to wake snorers up gently. Their gradual return to consciousness supposedly prevents them realising that you've done anything to them, so they don't get grumpy and defensive. Presumably this is only the case as long as you remove your finger from their ear really quickly - whereas mine gets a bit stuck.

"Wha' the hell?" Max says, batting my hand away. "What are you doing?"

I don't want to tell him, so I try to convert the ear-poking into an ear-tickling manoeuvre motivated by nothing more sinister than affection. I forget that Max's ears are erogenous zones, until my "caress" is reciprocated with uncharacteristic enthusiasm, and one thing leads to another. So now I have no idea what happened to Wallander, nor what the hell I am doing planning to meet an International Director of a Global Oil Company for a "date" in a hotel tomorrow evening - unbeknownst to my husband.

Isn't that just bloody typical? My Nan always said be careful what you wish for, 'cause you just might get it - usually at the most inconvenient time, in my experience. I can't concentrate at all - and I'm tired. I'm getting loads of calls about Connaught today but, luckily, most of them are from Council tenants, who are ringing to check whether the company's collapse means that the Council will just move the existing repairs staff over to another company, or whether they'll "get people who know what they're doing" instead.

Although I can just about handle these conversations, I shall probably fall asleep as soon as Mr Beales or any of the deadly boring squad phone, and then Greg will have to try the ear-poking trick on me. He has fat fingers while I have freakishly small ears, so that won't end well either. Subtitles are much more hazardous than has previously been appreciated.


*The Swedish version of Wallander is miles better than Branagh's recent UK version. See here for more information, but don't forget - you can't be too careful where foreign language programming is concerned.