It's been a very quiet week after all the fun with our visitors, which is just as well really because I start my new job next week.

I have been tidying the house and have discovered my sister leaves even more things behind her than I do when she stays with someone. So far we have found her baseball cap, sunglasses, a spare lead for her dog, her little one's crayons, some jewellery, two nighties, a pair of slippers, two T-shirts and a pair of jeans.

My friend, on the other hand, seems to have gathered up her three children without leaving anything at all behind. It must be a McCall family trait.

Daughter has also been focusing on work this week, as it has been time for the results of her end-of-term exams.

She's done quite well, which she is very pleased about. I am very pleased because it justifies all the horrible nagging and shouting I did about her revising. I don't like being that sort of mum but all that stuff about sitting down and quietly reasoning with your child just doesn't seem to work once they've entered the teenage years.

Not that reasoning has ever really worked with daughter, who was born with the Children's Rights Act under one arm. My mum says she's just like I was, which she seems to find amusing for some reason.

Daughter is rapidly becoming a typical teenager. I wonder if it is the same gene that enables toddlers to sit in front of the TV happily watching the same Disney video over and over again that makes a teenage girl play the same Shakira CD 20 times in succession or wear the same favourite top five days in a row.

At least daughter's not into today's equivalent of punk rock like I was. The worst she's done so far is spray her hair pink with washable hairspray or try to sneak out of the house with a bit of pale blue eye shadow on. This is definitely preferable to having it cropped short and bleached, then styling it into yellow spikes like I did in my teens. It was supposed to be platinum silver rather than yellow but I did not, of course, listen to mum's advice at the time, because I, of course, knew best.

I understand now how distressed mum must have been at the loss of my waist-length hair which had only been cut twice in my life.

I daresay daughter will do similarly distressing things. There's plenty of time for all that over the next few years.