Your house, their rules

How complicated can that be? Make a bit of food, get a few drinks in. Yes, but Carey doesn’t eat just anything.

He’s a flag-bearer for the Mc- Donalds generation, brought up on fast food – and he looks like it. His Mum is pretty and attractive in a compact, rounded way.

You can see she’s going to balloon one day, and is probably doing well to have avoided it so far, in her early 30s.

Carey, on the other hand, is already built like a wobbly tank, the kind of figure who barrels around the playground, laughing in his carefree, innocent bubble and steam-rolling everyone in his path.

So, no salted fish with sweet peppers for him, thank you. No paella either, because he doesn’t eat seafood. Well, when have you ever seen that on a fast food poster? He will eat chicken, though, because that comes in cardboard tubs, so he can relate to it. We stick a big leg and thigh in the oven and my wife makes a chocolate cake and chocolate sauce.

She’s highly experienced with kids, and although I have brought up two boys, I didn’t put up with as much as many parents apparently do. Or maybe I was just lucky.

There is a salad of lettuce, avocado and onion to go with the fish, although we realise it is unheard of on Planet Takeaway and the boy won’t seriously think we expect him to touch it.

Sure enough, the closest he gets to that sort of thing is tomatoes – in their sauce form.

He’s of the school that considers ketchup an essential on the table along with the salt and pepper.

Nothing gets my goat quite like someone putting Heinz’s red gloop on a dish that someone (particularly me) has already put plenty of flavour into, but what do I know? I’m a dinosaur.

We also provide those old-fashioned artefacts, a knife and fork, but Carey knows better and picks his chicken up with his hands. That’s how they do it in KFC, so it must be right.

Although it has been roasted rather than fried, the chicken fat is oozing down his chin as he tears at it like a starving caveman, but this is easily remedied.

With a slick motion he lifts the neck of his T-shirt and wipes his chops inside it.

Walter appears not to notice and certainly exerts no influence on the proceedings, despite being the closest thing the boy has to a father.

If this child were mine he would be in big trouble, but you can’t scold other people’s kids. Actually I had done so not two weeks earlier - and in the hallowed halls of McD’s at that.

Sitting in the children’s section because the place was full, we were subjected to a screaming child somewhere out of sight at the top of a corkscrew slide.

And not just screaming on and off, but one long, sustained, unwarranted, deliberate racket that drew no response from whoever was supposed to be in charge of her. I leaned towards the bottom of the chute and bellowed “Shaddaaaap!” and she did.

I might get sued for traumatising the poor little soul if they ever catch up with me, but don’t parents teach them about screaming for no reason these days? Meanwhile back at dinner with Walter and Carey, we’re onto the pudding. The boy’s big, cartoon eyes light up at the sugary brown sight and he attacks it with gusto, showing surprising skill with a spoon, but that doesn’t mean all in the area remains pristine.

His (unchallenged) addiction to his phone means he is soon licking it to retrieve splashes of sweet brown stuff, and once this is done he is finished and leaves the table without a word, retiring to a hammock, where he proceeds to look at and listen to things on Facebook.

Now there’s a point of 21st century etiquette that needs addressing. You can read what you like and watch what you like, because it doesn’t affect the rest of the people in the vicinity, but imposing your sound on them is another matter.

I’m enjoying the fruits of my iTunes and I’d like to think the other adults are too, and the last thing we want is whatever intellectually insulting row the boy is allowing to blast from his device.

As a parent you have to keep questioning yourself, because there is no training for it, and I suppose we all think we’re doing a decent job, but other people’s kids s o m e - t i m e s take us to a parallel universe w h e r e all is not what we assumed it was.