Number 1 son offered to make lunch, and without thinking I said “Yes please.”

He’s in his 20s, he’s been away for 3 years, he hasn’t starved to death, it was beans on toast. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, first of all, he decided to add scrambled eggs. Second, without telling me what he was doing, he left the eggs on the stove and went to do something else. The first I knew about it was when the smoke started to catch in my throat.

Strange I thought, burning food doesn’t usually – then I was grasped by another coughing fit.

Our traditional egg dish for breakfast and brunch type meals can best be described as  a form of scrambled eggs in which the eggs are bashed about a bit and things like vegetables and bacon are mixed in.

In this case he added onion and chilli. I may have mentioned last week that he is a in a chilli phase. Much the same as I am in  a milk drinking phase.

When you burn chilli it appears to produce a throat grasping acrid smoke that makes your eyes water.

The thing about child rearing is that you have to encourage them, even when it means eating burnt eggs with too much chilli in them.

The erst of the day, quite frankly, was an anticlimax after that, so that’s where I’ll end – a smoky kitchen, tears in my eyes, a rasp in my throat and a deep-seated desire to see him finish his Masters, get a job and bugger off before he destroys my kitchen or my taste buds.