Then Helen and I both went very quiet because we were thinking of showing our vajazzle to Luke Costello. Well, I was anyway.

After a few seconds I wiped the sweat off my forehead and, to lighten to mood, I declared, ‘Do you know something? I think I’ll get a vajazzle myself!’

‘Why not?’ Helen said gaily – too gaily, and I knew for sure she’d been thinking of Luke Costello too. ‘What would you get done? Padre Pio?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, ignoring the fact that she was trying to ‘rile’ me by being disrespectful about Padre Pio. ‘Or maybe a Cornetto. Or –’ and I was laughing away to myself at this point – ‘to lure your father, maybe I’ll get a golf club.’

Suddenly Helen was frozen still and she stared at me like she’d seen a terrible car crash, and she said, ‘That image is going to stay with me for ever. I’m scarred for life.’

‘Yes,’ I said, making right sport at this stage. ‘I think I’ll definitely get a golf club. To get your father … In. Ter. Es. Ted.’ And I said it slowly, the way I’ve just described – In. Ter. Es. Ted. – to sound ‘saucy’.

‘I’m going to get sick.’ Helen clapped her hand over her mouth and raced out to the downstairs cloakroom, and the next thing I hear all these gawking noises.

I knew she wasn’t really getting sick; she was only dry-retching for ‘dramatic effect’.

‘Your generation think you invented sex,’ I called out to her.

‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘Shut up!’

‘You want me to have never had sex!’

‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘Shut up!’

‘How do you think you were conceived?’

‘Shut up,’ she shrieked. ‘Shut up!’

‘When you think about it,’ I said, happy as you please, ‘I must have done it at least five times!’

And that was the end of that; no more was said about the vajazzling.

But I still think about it from time to time.

V is also for Vonnie. Let me tell you about Vonnie! Helen has a boyfriend called Artie. A fine-looking man. Fine-looking. I accidentally saw some nudie photos of him and, believe you me, he is a fine-looking man. My feelings about Artie are, as they say on the Facebooks, ‘complicated’, and one of the reasons they’re so complicated is that Artie was once married to a woman and her name was – yes, you have it! – Vonnie. I don’t know – short for Yvonne or Veronica or something.

The reason that Artie and Vonnie are no longer married is because Vonnie ran off with a youngster in a pork-pie hat. So naturally you’d assume that, like normal people, they’d hate each other, and bad-mouth each other to the children (they’ve three). But, oh no, Vonnie is best friends with Artie. Artie who is my daughter’s boyfriend. Do you get me? Do you see what I’m driving at? Oh great pals, Vonnie and Artie. Vonnie is forever over at Artie’s house, throwing barbecues, doing jigsaws (yes, you heard right! Jigsaws!), acting for all the world like a married couple.

To make things worse, I can see that some men would find this Vonnie alluring. She’s small and skinny, skinnier than her fifteen-year-old daughter, and has no shame about displaying her upper arms. She goes round in flip-flops and faded jeans and cheesecloth tops falling off her shoulders. And although I don’t like admitting it, she’s a bit of a beauty. Not only that, she’s a ‘good laugh’, and great company and very accomplished.

I worry about Vonnie. More to the point, even though Helen is the toughest thing on the planet, I worry about Helen. When I say my prayers at night I always ask the Lord, ‘Please make Vonnie go away. Not die or anything bad like that, but maybe you could get her a job in Antwerp.’

W is for Work. As in ‘work’ being ‘done’ on ‘yourself’. And the funny thing is that there are two different types of work you can have done on yourself. You can have the work that Claire has done on herself – Botox round her eyes and at the sides of her mouth to make her smile (as she says, and I’m quoting, ‘With my shitty life, what have I to smile about?’), Restylane to fill in the lines on her forehead so that she doesn’t look like she’s frowning all the time (‘With my shitty life, I’ve plenty to frown about!’), and collagen injections into her cheeks to give her youthful plumpness (‘With my shitty life, is it any wonder that I’m old before my time?’).

(I would never say this to her face because she’d eat the head off of you as soon as look at you, but Claire’s life doesn’t seem at all ‘shitty’ to me. She’s got that Adam, who thinks the sun shines out of her rear end, and they’ve a fine house and she’s always getting her highlights done and having barbecues and parties and getting ‘scuttered’.)

But back to the Botox et al… . Although I enjoy extraordinarily youthful looks, especially considering the life of worry I’ve had with the five of them, I would ‘never say never’ to the idea of that kind of work. But not until I need it, of course. You hear of some girls of twenty-three having ‘work’ ‘done’ and you think, ‘Why would you be getting it done so young?’ Well, it’s the same for me.

Then there’s the ‘work’ that Rachel has ‘done’ on herself, and that’s another kind of work entirely. That’s all head-shrinky stuff, psychotherapy and ‘the talking cure’ and whatnot. You can’t scratch your chin without Rachel reading something into it.

It’s a load of bloody nonsense all that psychotherapy business – and there’s no way on God’s good earth that you can trust these ‘therapists’ to keep their clobs shut. A few glasses of wine at a dinner party and shur, they’d be regaling everyone with stories of all their clients’ secrets – affairs and abortions and cross-dressing and incest and shop-lifting and anything else you care to mention.

I don’t blame these people – I know in my heart of hearts that I’d do it myself. It’s human nature, isn’t it? If you hear a good juicy secret, how can you help but blurt it out? It’s like eating Pringles: you can’t stop yourself.

(Not priests, though. Priests are different. Whatever they hear within the confines of the confession box stays secret. They are blessed with divine clob-shutting abilities.)