IT'S the day before my English A-level exam and I haven't even started reading King Lear. Panic grips my stomach. Shakespeare was always a foreign language to me, so learning it in 24 hours is impossible.

I wake up in a cold sweat, sitting bolt upright, before blessed relief sinks in. It was just a dream - a dream which, at the (relatively young) age of 39, refuses to go away. And that just goes to show the depth of the pyschological scars left by homework.

Mercifully, homework became a thing of the past - but then our eldest started at big school. He gets tons of homework and I try to support him, while being careful not to help him too much.

The trouble is that he's inherited my habit of leaving it until the last minute, which is how I ended up drowning in prime factors at six o'clock in the morning...

I'd come home from work and walked straight into a domestic dispute. The boy was distraught upstairs because he'd left his homework until it was too late, and Mum had refused to let him start it at 9pm.

"I'm in BIG TROUBLE," he sniffed. "I'll have to get up at six o'clock in the morning to do it."

Recalling my own homework nightmares, sympathy got the better of me and I made a rash offer: "Give me a nudge and I'll get up and help." It seemed like a good idea at the time. At six the next morning, it seemed like a very stupid idea indeed. The covers were warm and I was dreaming of someone far more appealing than King Lear - Kylie Minogue to be exact.

Nevertheless, a promise is a promise and, bleary-eyed, I got up, made a cuppa and stared at the boy's maths homework.

I was even worse at maths than I was at Shakespeare and, at six in the morning - having been torn from Kylie's arms - I wasn't feeling too clever.

Q1: In the square opposite, ring the prime numbers.

Luckily, the boy knew the score: "It's numbers that you can only divide by one and themselves," he explained.

"Oh, of course," I replied...

Q2: Which of these are prime numbers?: 107, 117, 141, 199, 227.

And so it went on.

Q3: Is 729,064 a prime number?

"Tricky," I muttered.

Q4: Write each of the following as a product of prime factors: 90, 120, 140,180, 210, 864, 1000.

Mmm. Let me think. . .

Q5: Find the prime factorisation of 504.

I hadn't even been able to find some milk for my tea, let alone track down the prime factorisation of 504. . .

Q6: Express the following as the sum of two prime numbers: 10, 20, 30.

Well, er. . .

Q7: Express the following as a product of prime factors: 7, 9, 47, 105, 648, 220, 405, 25920.

My head hurt. . .

Somehow, we fumbled our way through every question, apart from writing 864 as a product of prime factors.

We gave up just as the rest of the family were starting to rise from their slumbers and the birds were chirruping outside.

"You're up early. Everything OK?" asked Mum.

"Not really," I moaned. "I can't work out the product of 864 in prime factors and I've got a headache."

I decided I needed to go back to bed for an hour so I could be reunited with Kylie. Now there's a prime figure I can appreciate.

THE THINGS THEY SAY

JACK had been grumbling about the problems of getting old - arthritis, poor hearing, etc. His grandson, Billy, asked him: "But Grandpa, aren't there any good things about being old?"

"Yes," replied Jack. "You can sing while you clean your teeth."

(The above was pinched from Pat Smith, writing in the North Yorkshire East Federation WI News.)