THANK Goodness there is no such creature as the perfect parent. How scary would that be?

Let’s face it, whatever you do as a parent is wrong. Go to work and you’re neglecting your children. Stay at home and you’re setting them a bad example.

Keep them in and you’re making them fat and stunting their development.

Let them roam free and you’re wickedly irresponsible.

Be too indulgent and you’re ruining a generation. Be too strict and you’ll end up in court.

Smacking is bad. I think we’d pretty much agreed on that. But this week an American psychologist says that children who are smacked do better in school.

Ho hum.

Pushy parents are the latest to get it in the neck, this time from broadcaster Kirsty Young, who is particularly enraged by the full-time mothers determined to turn their babies into junior Einsteins.

Mothers who’ve given up careers have to justify their decision, so their child becomes their project in a sort of school gate competition. All those after-school activities – football, ballet, music, extra tuition. In my niece’s posh circles there are even eight-year-olds doing Mandarin.

I bet they wish they had hopeless parents.

As the only child of a full-time working mother, from the age of seven I came home to an empty house and hated it. On the other hand, it made me independent and I didn’t have to go through all the violin/piano/elocution lessons that many of my friends had to do. Or the daily interrogation. My parents couldn’t have been more loving but basically they didn’t have a clue about what went on in my life, which suited me fine.

And I’ve turned out all right, haven’t I? Oh well...

In the entire history of the world, parents have never worried so much about how they’re bringing up their children. There have never been so many experts, so many books on childcare, so many television programmes, magazine articles and websites.

And the chances are that at some point, they all contradict each other.

No wonder parents are so stressed.

So relax. Ignore the experts. As long as your children are loved and secure, everything else can be muddled through.

Whatever you do is wrong. Or right. And no one else is perfect either.

Cling on to that thought.

THIS week is the busiest in the year for divorce lawyers as marriages come apart as quickly as a cracker, but with no jokes and a lot more sparks.

Experts have always put it down to the stress of being cooped up in a family Christmas as the final straw for marriages that were already rocky.

But I bet a lot is because many women, especially, will have delayed the divorce until after Christmas – going through the traditional jollity one more time with gritted teeth for the sake of the kids, the family and maybe even the in-laws.

Now they don’t have to pretend any longer and by starting early, by next Christmas, everyone will be used to the idea and well on their way to their new lives.

Which is why they were at the solicitors first thing on Monday morning.

THE salt bins at the bottom of our village – steep hill, nasty bends, bus route, already an accident involving an ambulance – have been empty since at least Christmas Eve. Heavy snow and even lower temperatures were forecast, so I contacted North Yorkshire Council.

They promised a reply within 20 days...

You can hardly blame the council if they’ve been listening to the weather forecasters. The BBC’s online forecast is great fun, changing its mind every few hours and consequently utterly unreliable. I think they choose the forecast in the same mindless way I choose horses in the National, with a pin and blind guesswork – and with about as much success.

So far for today it has promised either heavy snow or light snow or sleet or glorious sunshine, which is one way of hedging its bets. It is apparently set to be the coldest winter since 1962. Yet the Met men – remember?

– promised us a mild winter.

No doubt to go with that mythical barbecue summer we were meant to have too...

A House full of nobodies

PERHAPS we should sue Celebrity Big Brother under the Trade Descriptions Act.

Well, have you even heard of more than half of the so-called celebrities?

Apart from the lovely Stephanie Beacham, who must have signed up in an absent-minded fit of madness – or to boost her pension plan – the nearest person with any class is soccer hard man Vinnie Jones. Says it all really.

Thankfully, Paul Gascoigne apparently said no at the last minute.

Knowing his fragility, why on earth did the programme makers even consider him? That’s not entertainment, that’s downright cruelty.

Still, at least it’s the last-ever series.

But then they’ll think of something even worse.

Public hangings anyone?

A killer instinct

NOVELIST PD James, was brilliant on the Today programme.

Politely, persistently and devastatingly, she made absolute mincemeat of the BBC’s director general Mark Thompson as she questioned him about the hugely bloated salaries of BBC executives and what exactly they do for all that money. He was left floundering and foolish.

PD James is 89.

Now we understand why the BBC has been so keen to keep older women off the airwaves.

They’re too good.

Backchat

Dear Sharon, FOR all my married life I have been Mother Christmas, just as you said, doing all the planning, shopping and preparing for the big day. A few weeks ago I fell down the steps (quite sober!), broke my arm and tore ligaments in my ankle.

I was pretty well immobilised and thought I’d have to cancel the usual family Christmas.

Not a bit of it. My son Alex, home from Dubai, took charge, helped by his father. They did all the last-minute shopping and preparation. When my daughter arrived with her family on Christmas Eve, our son-in-law Paul, was roped in to help too and it became a lads’ Christmas.

They did it brilliantly. All I did was lie on the settee and offer occasional words of advice. I liked that! I have suggested that as they did it so well, they should do it again next year. I’ve told them it could be a new tradition as after nearly 30 years Mother Christmas has resigned.

Sue Brown, Darlington.

World's tallest skyscraper

THE world’s tallest skyscraper opened in Dubai this week. The Burj Khalifa is 2,717 ft high, costs £1bn and will contain 1,000 apartments, a hotel and offices – many of which are not yet finished and not yet let as Dubai faces financial meltdown. It’s the ultimate boy’s status symbol, built just to be bigger than anyone else’s. Well gosh. And otherwise pretty pointless, especially in the current climate. Hard to think it won’t be another Ozymandias – a giant edifice, crumbling into the sands of the desert. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” Still, at least the fireworks looked fun.