Talking about Sex over Pork Chops; Warning!

Ahh, the family dinner table. We don't have one. Instead we have one of those "magnetically charged tables that attracts all manner of crappy family detritus and occasional luxuriating feline that means it can't be used as a table" table. It's the storage drawer equivalent of an open Danish sandwich (hands up who else made those in P4 in the early 80's - probably as part of your international project which also took in Morris dancing and the native bagpipes -and was squeezed in between making a giant wall collage of Smaug, a paper mâché head of Bilbo Baggins and giving a rendition of Tight Fit's "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" to a deeply unimpressed classroom with your best pal, both dressed in customised pillow cases emblazoned with hand scrawled and coloured Japanese flags? No? Just me then).

Back to the table. Every so often I remember that really irritating phrase that Kirsty Allsop probably shrilly trills on a daily basis, "a family that eats together, stays together" and guilt trip myself into insisting they clear the flotsam and jetsam and sit at the table to eat. Always ends in aggro of some sort. But it also always starts with some dodgy conversational gems.

Tonight's included Sam telling his sister that she had to pay attention at the living and growing sessions at primary school because if you DO IT WRONG YOU DIE.

I, and no doubt Dave too, being idiots, immediately started silently questioning why on earth sex education classes would be illustrating anatomically challenging positions that risked death, until we realised he meant STDs. Tess didn't even have time to freak out because Dave started giving some uniquely sage advice about handling school talks about boobs and P.U.B.E.S. - being shy, I can only spell it, not say it - ending with the following advice, "do not be scared of boobs or p.u.b.e.s, but run away if you see boobs with p.u.b.e.s"

I grew up in a house when even the tampax advert would make me blush and cringe, and talk of procreation while eating mashed potatoes would just not have happened. Ever. Changed days. Meanwhile the mystic magnetic Table had already attracted a large mass of Unidentified Family Objects. Breakfast will be a squash and a squeeze. Wild body form, Body formed for youuuuuuuuu, a wimbawe a wimbawe, a wimbawe.....