Monday

Boomerang kids – adult children who return to their parents’ home because they can’t afford a place of their own – are seldom out of the news these days. One recent report tried to work out a formula for how much parents should charge a child who turns up announced, while another concluded that parents’ quality of life nose-dived every time a kid boomeranged. I have rather mixed feelings about this. My daughter is currently sharing a flat with her boyfriend and has just announced they may move to Minneapolis for a few years, while my son, who is about to finish university, says he would rather live in the back of a van and travel round Europe for a year picking up odd jobs rather than come home for more than a few days at a time. Plans may change and hard financial realities may kick in at some time, of course, but part of me is thrilled both that my wife and I have brought up two children who have the confidence to leave home and that everything that was in the fridge when I left the house will still be in it when I get back. But I also miss them a great deal. Even when they are annoying. It’s sod’s law. When they were young I spent a long time wishing they were more independent and now that they are I wish they were a little less so.

Tuesday

According to one of my lobby friends who has forgotten more about politics than I will ever know, one of the great unexplained mysteries of Westminster is how Boris Johnson remains foreign secretary. Time and again he seems to get away with things that would have cost lesser mortals their job. Today he came to parliament to answer an urgent question on Britain’s relations with Russia following the suspected poisoning of the former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. Boris had one job: to sound tough while remaining non-committal and refusing to speculate on the outcome of any investigation. Something that comes as second nature to most ministers who spend hours at the dispatch box saying nothing. For the first 20 minutes or so, Boris stuck to his brief but then he couldn’t help himself and unilaterally announced that we were at war with Russia. The usual protocol for starting a war is a cabinet discussion followed by a warning to the foreign power in question. Not content with that, he then went on to say that if, as he suspected, the Russians were behind the assassination attempt, then Britain wouldn’t be competing in the World Cup. Boris seemed unaware that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland had already taken that decision by deliberately failing to qualify for the finals and that, if past performance was any guide, England would voluntarily make their own protest by refusing to play and getting knocked out in the group stages.

Wednesday

It ended as it so often does. In heartbreak. Having dominated much of the game at Wembley and taken a half-time lead, Spurs lost concentration for a four-minute spell after the break and were knocked out of the Champions League by Juventus. Though I was bitterly disappointed by the result, I did take some masochistic pleasure in the nature of the performance. Over the many years I’ve been supporting Spurs, one of their traits I’ve most come to value is that they so often let you down. Their disappointments mirror my own and somehow make me feel better about myself. They do my failing for me. I’m not sure I could quite cope with supporting a team who regularly lift trophies. Not only would I start taking success for granted, it would also make me feel inadequate. The loss to Juve was classic Spurs: first the hope, as Tottenham appeared capable of swatting aside the Italian champions, then the crushing sense of defeat. After several years of watching Spurs play some of the best football I have ever seen, it was as if normal service had been – albeit temporarily – resumed. And I’m sure Sunday’s long trek down to the south coast to watch them play Bournemouth in the Premier League will be all the sweeter for it.

Thursday

The world’s oldest message in a bottle has been found on a beach in Western Australia nearly 132 years after it was tossed overboard from a German ship in the Indian Ocean. Scientists believe the bottle had floated at sea for the best part of a year before getting washed up and buried in the sand. Even though the message was basically only a list of coordinates – the bottle was apparently one of many thrown overboard as part of an experiment to measure currents – its survival still appealed to the romantic in me. A voice from the past finally getting heard. When I was a child, my father encouraged me to put a message in a bottle and throw it over the side of the small boat we were sailing in off the Pembrokeshire coast. He handed me a Schweppes Bitter Lemon bottle and told me to ask whoever found it to return it to our home address and that we would refund the postage. I thought no more about it for several months until a letter arrived for me. The bottle had been found. Sadly it hadn’t, as I had hoped, travelled half way round the world. It had wound up on a beach several miles from where I had thrown it.

Friday

A new survey by a global education charity has found that British parents are among the worst for helping their children with their homework. Only the Japanese and the Finns came out worse. Although, thankfully, our days of having to supervise homework are long past, in my wife’s and my defence, our performance wasn’t always always down to sheer laziness. Both our children were always extremely reluctant to ask us for any assistance: not because they had the can-do ethic of wanting to sort their maths and English problems for themselves, but because they both assumed from an early age that we were congenital idiots who couldn’t possibly know anything. And they weren’t always wrong. When my daughter was writing her final essay for her English A-level on meanings of love in three works of literature, she finally agreed to let me read her final draft as I knew the three books in question well. I made what I thought were helpful revisions and helped her to rewrite certain sections in shorter sentences to make it more readable. To my surprise – she must have been desperate – she accepted all my suggestions. The draft came back as a fail, with the comment that many of my insights were just plain wrong and that the use of short sentences was a big mistake. She went back to the original text she had written before I got my mitts on it and duly got an A.

Digested week, digested: Boris thinks it’s all over ... it is now.