YOU know you're getting old when your wife comes home from the shops, hands you a bottle of special "hair thickening" shampoo and says: "Thought you might like to try this."

But something else happened last week which made me realise just how quickly the years are thinning out: I became the father of a teenager.

I have no idea how it happened. One minute I was writing the very first Dad At Large column about teaching him to knock the drips off Mr Todgy, and the next minute he'd been transformed into The Incredible Hulk.

It is a quite incredible metamorphosis which has happened gradually, yet suddenly.

The latest pen mark measuring his height on the garage door shows he's now taller than his mother, though she's in denial. I mistake his boxer shorts for mine and his shoes must surely belong to the Big Friendly Giant.

This was a baby who simply wouldn't sleep, to the extent that his mother and I had to take it in shifts to get some rest.

How could I ever forget the late-night drives to anywhere and nowhere, with him in his baby seat, while I sang the theme from Neighbours over and over again because it was the only way to stop him crying?

"Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours, with a little understanding..."

The second I stopped singing, he'd start squawking again so I just kept going. I put it down to his mother having spent too much time sitting in front of the television when she was pregnant. He must have associated the music with the bliss of being in the womb.

Once he was born, I'd be up with the larks, daybreak after daybreak, pushing his rocker with my foot while he watched the same Winnie the Pooh video for the umpteenth time.

But guess what? Now he's a teenager you can't wake him up. He doesn't get out of bed at weekends until lunchtime and when he does make it downstairs, he stays in his dressing gown all day if he can get away with it.

"Do I have to?" he grunts when told to get dressed. "Do I have to?" is a question teenagers ask a lot.

He might not squawk anymore but he's perfected the art of going off in a huff.

During one particularly long episode of The Incredible Sulk, he didn't speak to his mother for three whole days.

"It's the principle," he explained when I asked him why he wouldn't make up with her.

"What principle?" I inquired.

"The principle that she always has to be right," he said.

I tried to explain that this was a principle that men simply have to learn to accept but it didn't seem to help.

I ended up being counselled by his nine-year-old brother: "Don't worry, Dad - it's just his age," he told me. "Teenagers are like that."

The only consolation is that some of his friends seem to be even worse.

The cute, chatterbox kids he used to play with at nursery come round the house in their giant, clod-hopper shoes but seldom speak. On the odd occasions that they do communicate - usually only when they're asked if they want something to eat - it is with strangely deep, mono-syllabic voices, just starting to break. Bambi meets Rocky.

What makes it all worse is that older parents who've lived through this testosterone-fuelled hell, populated by these strange hybrid creatures, take sadistic delight in warning that it gets far, far worse before it gets any better.

Get used to doors being slammed off their hinges, they say, and tuneless music blaring from ghetto-blasters.

And our teenager is already asking about driving lessons so it's just a few short years until he's revving his engine at 1am outside the house in our quiet village cul-de-sac.

All of which reminds me of a song I know: "Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours, with a little understanding..."

THE THINGS THEY SAY

THROUGH the Tyne Tunnel and beyond, the long road north took the Dad At Large Roadshow to Choppington Social Welfare Centre for a meeting of the East Northumberland Federation of Townswomen's Guilds.

Jean Johnson recalled how her son Martin, three at the time but a dad-of-two now, looked out of the window and asked: "Mummy, why is Mrs Andrew's hiding her onions?"

Mrs Andrews was actually planting her spring bulbs.

PAM Lynn recalled how her son Christopher, as a little boy, got into her bed for a cuddle and inadvertently touched her chest.

"What's that?" he asked innocently.

"It's my bosom," she replied.

"What's that for?" he asked.

"When mummies have babies, they have milk in for the babies to drink," she explained.

"Oh," replied Christopher. "Can't they have shandy?"

Published: 03/07/2003