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girls out to see a movie tonight – the sort of appalling load of old rubbish where ladies go on about their shoes, hair, feelings, etc. etc. etc., and then have to decide whether to go out with the nice geeky bloke or the cool handsome one, and they choose the cool one – only to find out that he’s nasty, and he snogs their best friend, and then they end up with the geeky one, who turns out to be quite cool and really good-looking when he takes his glasses off.
    Obviously, I’d rather scoop out my eyeballs with a stale donut than go and see one of those films. So me and Dad spent the night watching
The Great Escape
for the eighteenth time and eating pizza. This was allowed because the pizza was a vegetarian one, but for once the vegetableness of it didn’t ruin the pizzariness of it.

    Despite the pizza and the movie, my dad still seemed a bit down in the dumps. I felt I should try to talk to him about …
things
. The trouble is, I don’t really have the vocabulary for it. Maybe if I’d gone to the rubbish girlie movie with Mum and Ruby and Ella I could have picked up some tips.
    So I had to take a plunge into the Unknown.
    ‘You all right, Dad?’
    ‘What? Oh, yeah.’
    There was a pause for about ten minutes. We were at the part where Steve McQueen is bouncing the ball against the wall of the cooler. 1
    ‘Do you want the rest of your pizza, Dad?’
    ‘Help yourself.’
    Some more time went by. Steve McQueen tried to jump his motorbike over the fence and into Switzerland.
    ‘Are you sure you’re OK, Dad? It’s just you seem a bit, er, not OK.’
    My dad took a sip of his beer and I took a sip of my diet cola.
    Then Dad did something unheard of. He paused the movie.
    ‘The thing is, son, when you’re an adult, sometimes you look around and you think, is that it? Have I already had all the good things and, from now on, is it only this? Because I didn’t actually have that many good things, and it doesn’t seem fair.’
    I didn’t really know what to say to that. And then, as if by magic, I sort of
did
know what to say next.
    ‘Sometimes, Dad, when I get a box of donuts, I eat them without really paying attention to them. So I sort of waste them. All I get is the calories and the fat and the sugar, but not the fun. And then I look down and the donuts are all gone. And that’s pretty depressing. But then it hits me: if I want to, tomorrow I can just go out and get some more donuts. Because there are still, you know, donuts out there, just waiting for you.’
    My dad nodded and hit the ‘play’ button. And then, about five minutes later, he started to laugh and he threw a nibbled quadrant of pizza crust at me, and then I laughed too, and pretty soon we were laughing so hard we were spraying out pizza crumbs and cola and beer.
    We were still laughing when the girls came in. They all had black lines on their cheeks from where their eye make-up stuff had run because of all the crying they’d been doing in their soppy film. So I reckoned that, in this particular war between boys and girls, we’d won 10–0.
DONUT COUNT:

    All that talk of donuts had given me a craving for the real thing but a) I didn’t have any, and b) I was quite full of pizza, and c) I had a funny feeling that something was coming – something that might need to be confronted with a stomach full of donut, so I’d better save up my allowance.
    1 If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you should just watch
The Great Escape
, because it’s the third most brilliant film in the history of the world.

SATURDAY 20 JANUARY/SUNDAY 21 JANUARY
    LIKE I SAID , I’d known it was coming for a while, but some ancient instinct for self-preservation kept it from the forefront of my mind. ‘It’ was Doc Morlock, the nutritionist who’d made my life hell last term by banning donuts (or trying to) and generally being mean – not to mention her possession of a mouth like a cat’s bum and a vulture neck and scaly claws instead of