Accommodationally challenged after a disastrous foreign trip in 2007, CJ Stone was forced to take refuge with his parents. It was the first time he’d lived with them since his teens, and he was surprised to find himself in a war zone. Following are CJ’s bulletins from the front line in the eternal war of age and sex.

It was coming up for Christmas. My sister was staying with us, consequently I’d been relegated to the spare room, while Mum was having to share the bed with Dad. If they were perturbed by this new-found, enforced intimacy, then they were pretending not to bother.

My sister is the last member of our family to smoke. She lives in Tenerife, where cigarettes are very cheap. She’s comes over loaded up with cigarettes by the suitcase-full and smokes almost continuously, hovering round at the kitchen door to blow her smoke into the back garden.

Mum packed up smoking a year ago, but unlike me, she still misses it. You can see her sniffing the trail of Jewell’s smoke as she passes by, and every so often I catch them huddled together at the kitchen table trying to look all innocent. I just know that the cigarette that my sister is holding has recently been at my mother’s lips.

“If you’re going to smoke then smoke Mum. There’s no point in pretending,” I say.

“Just don’t tell your father,” she says, rescuing the recently abandoned cigarette from my sister’s fingers. “It’s just the one.”

Oh yes? I’m not sure at what point I got landed with the job of moral enforcer, but I don’t like it. There seems to be some role-reversal going on here: me trying hard not to look disapprovingly at her weakness; her trying hard not to look found-out and guilty, like a toddler caught with her fingers in the sugar bowl.

But the house is very jolly. Rusty, my other sister, who lives just down the road, is over for a visit. It’s a family get-together.

The sisters are on the settee, bathed in the pale light of the winter sun, while the parents are upstairs getting ready. They are all going Christmas shopping. Rusty is flicking idly through the newspaper, rattling the pages as she does so, looking for bargains.

Suddenly she says, having spied an advert: “You can buy a dinner suit from Matalan for £40.”

“Come on,” I say. “£40 for a dinner suit. It’s got to be crap.”

Rusty says, “That’s how much it would cost to hire one. So you can buy a new one and just wear it one night.”

Meanwhile Jewell, mishearing, says, “Some people wouldn’t mind laying out forty quid so that it matches the rest of the table.”

Pardon? Everybody laughs. “So they make dinner suits in co-ordinating colours to match your table cloth and napkins now?” I say. “How very modern.”

She thought we’d been talking about a £40 dinner service.

The whole family are great fans of Matalan whose original shop was situated not more than forty miles from where we were brought up. It’s cheap and cheerful, just like our family.

It’s where they are planning to go today: to the brand new Matalan store in the Ben Kingsley Retail Park near Shopsville, where they will be doing their Christmas shopping for the next twenty years I suspect, buying matching dinner suits and napkins for the Christmas table, along with other useless knickknacks that will fall apart on the very first use.

I must say, I don’t like Christmas myself. All that enforced jollity. Right now I had this annoying tune going through my head: The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year, by Andy Williams. No it’s not. It’s The Most Irritating Time Of The Year. What other time of the year will you be subjected to sleigh bells in the supermarket and Andy Williams and other dreary seasonal offerings all day every day without so much as a by-your-leave?

Another problem is that in your desperation to get all the shopping done you go into some form of a blind frenzy. This is a bit like that battle frenzy that Viking Berserkers were said to experience, where they saw red and wanted to kill everything in sight. Only you don’t see red, you see bargains. And you don’t want to kill everything in sight, you want to buy it.

I’d already bought a wooden dragon made of cut-out shapes from a market stall in Shopsville. It was only on reflection that I realised that I had no one to give it to. My son is 28 years old: far too grown up for wooden toys.

How many more bad buys was I going to make before the season was out?

Meanwhile the aging parents had got themselves ready at last and I was busy hustling them out of the door. I didn’t envy Dad. He was driving but this was definitely a girl’s day out. I imagined him trailing behind looking lost and disconsolate, like a schoolboy dragging his feet on his way to school.

It’s his punishment. He is made to go through this every year. Something he did one year which Mum will never let him forget, and for which he will forever be in debt.

It was Christmas a few years back. Just like today Mum was hustling about trying to get everything done. Every year it’s the same. Mum does most of it, the shopping, the preparations, the decoration. She buys all the presents, selecting them carefully to suit the various relatives. She’s usually spot on. Dad has only two jobs. He writes the Christmas cards and he buys just one very important present: the most important present of all.

And every year he makes a fuss about it. “I don’t know what to get you Molly,” he moans.

So this particular year she was a little fed-up with this on-going mantra. “If you can’t be bothered to go into Marks and Spencer and look in the women’s clothing department for something in a size fourteen,” she says, exasperated, “then forget it.”

So come Christmas day they were handing out the presents. She bought him a nice pullover, all wrapped up in shiny paper with a bow.

He must have been feeling very uncomfortable by now. He had nothing to give her.

“You said to forget about it,” he said.

You can imagine the look on Mum’s face.

An icy silence descended. He’s been paying for it ever since.