V IS for VODKA. Maybe even VANISHING VODKA. We went on holiday and left the boys at home. Well, we like to live dangerously.

More than that, Senior Son had a birthday while we were away. Party on.

The first time we ever left the boys totally on their own, we hardly forgot about them for a moment. That year, we were in a part of Wales that was - and is - way beyond mobile phone coverage.

Every time we found a phone box, we leapt in and rang home, expecting to hear news of disaster or the sounds of mayhem in the background.

It was a very good holiday, but not what you would call relaxing.

So far, we have always come back to find the boys alive, the house still standing and the neighbours still speaking to us. What more can you ask for?

Well, my bottle of vodka for a start. A friend had brought me a bottle of super strength, high proof, export vodka. I put it on the drinks dresser, looking forward to a super strength, high proof export Bloody Mary when the mood took me.

But when we came back, the dresser was fine, tidy, just as we'd left it - only with a gap where the vodka had been. Hey ho.

Vodka seems to be the drink of choice, starting at an incredibly young age - probably about 12 or 13, in the park after a few cans of lager. Maybe your son has never done that. Congratulations. He is, I'm afraid the exception.

One of the reasons they drink vodka is that they think it doesn't smell. They think they can get away with it as they come in walking very carefully and enunciating all their words very cl-ear-ly. As if that wasn't giveaway enough. How dumb do they think we are?

The other reason, of course, is that vodka doesn't actually taste of anything much, especially when it's drowned in the sickly sweet drinks that go with it. Oh for the days when booze tasted bitter and only grown ups could face it and children spat it out in disgust.

Anyway, as well as the missing vodka, there were the usual traces of partying round the house - smell of drink and cigarettes and a faint whiff of disinfectant, a clanking bin bag full of lager cans, fag ends in the drive, a spare bedroom heaped with duvets and sleeping bags, ten milk bottles on the doorstep, some half-hearted washing up and not a scrap of bread or bacon in the cupboards.

And on the back lawn, there was the biggest mystery of all. Three strange objects - an axe, a single trainer and a bucket.

It was just like something out of Midsomer Murders, or one of those questions in a comedy quiz show that invites contestants to invent a story. It would have challenged the combined minds of Morse and Poirot.

"Why," I asked, as I picked the things up and put them back in the garage, "was there an axe, a bucket and a single trainer lying in the middle of the lawn?"

At which point, the boys looked VAGUE and VANISHED out of the door.

Just another of life's little mysteries...