B is for BATHROOMS and BEDROOMS. This is an age when - almost overnight - your filthy little duckling metamorphosises into a well groomed swan. The mucky urchin who could spend an entire week in cub camp in the same socks and underpants, and never wash behind his ears or any other place much, suddenly discovers the joys of hot water.

So say goodbye to your bathroom...

William and the Outlaws would be disgusted, but teenage boys now spend as much time in the bathroom as do their sisters. Possibly more. The age when only sissies smelt sweet is ancient history. Adolescent boys have shelves full of lotions and potions, gels and creams, and are almost permanently pink and wrinkled from all those showers.

The man who reckoned showers were more economical than baths clearly didn't have teenage sons.

And while you're waiting to get into the bathroom, you might as well go and buy some more towels. Every time a boy has a shower he thinks: "How strange, there are no towels on the rail" so gets a fresh one out.

The reason there are no towels on the rail is that they are all in a wet heap on his bedroom floor.

Which brings us to BEDROOMS.

In one of nature's strange balancing acts, as adolescent boys get cleaner, their bedrooms get muckier. Indescribably so.

Do you ever see those wonderful pictures of teenage bedrooms in the glossy magazines? All stylish bunk beds, neat desks with computers, a guitar and a neat pile of books?

Ha! Believe me, they are fiction, fantasy, the wishful thinking of some poor deluded mother who has just felt two apple cores, three mouldy socks and the month-old remains of a bacon sandwich crunch beneath her feet as she dared to go into her son's room.

Quite early on in your son's adolescence, you have to make a decision. Do you insist on decent standards - bed made, carpets clean, everything organised?

Or do you save your energy and decide that his room is his concern and just close the door on it for the next ten years and try not to shudder if you ever get an accidental glimpse? I wasn't quite that brave.

Anyway, every few weeks there came a point when the rubbish began to spill out of their rooms and creep down the stairs, like something from a Hammer House of Horrors. At which point I would insist on a token clear out.

This usually resulted in five mugs, ten glasses, half a dozen plates and enough towels and T shirts to stock a decent sized market stall being liberated, not to mention most of the teaspoons and a few empty yoghurt pots. They would also fill a couple of bin bags with rubbish which - we usually discovered too late - had also included a few vital pages of course work.

And that would be it for another few weeks.

The first thing I did when they left home, was to give their bedrooms a major turn out. I felt like something out of Time Team, delving down through the archaeological layers. And when I got down as far the carpet - red in one room, blue in another, I'd quite forgotten it was so long since I'd seen it - I felt like Howard Carter faced with the wonders of Tutankhamen's tomb, revealed in daylight after centuries hidden beneath the murk.

Since the boys have gone, I've got used to the silence. But going upstairs and seeing two spotless bedrooms is seriously spooky

And suddenly there's not enough room in the airing cupboard for all those nice clean towels.

Published: 14/11/2002