Now that we’re heading into it, it is important to avoid post-Christmas regrets. Or at least nothing you can’t wriggle out of later on with an insincere apology.
Presents can cause most of the friction: and not even the why-did-you-think-I’d-want-that presents we get for adults. It’s the gifts for the kids that can do the most damage.
If you have a toddler, for instance, you, or some well-meaning relative, may get them an electronic toy. It doesn’t matter what sort: just that it makes a noise. Usually a twangy song, which, if the child is taken with the present, you will hear 14,000 times: over and over and over as your little darling delightedly hammers it.
But the good news is that these toys are mostly powered by batteries. And batteries run out. Sometimes, overnight, when the child is sleeping: just before that special day when all the battery shops go on a fortnight’s holiday.
The electronic toy won’t last. But the glitter will. Don’t, for a moment, think that you’ll be careful, that you’ll take all the necessary precautions. This is a fact: if an astronaut brought a vial of glitter up to the International Space Station, didn’t open it and left it there, they’d still find it embedded into their couch when they got home. Glitter is not inanimate. It can follow you anywhere.
It does, eventually, go; usually around the time the kids reach adulthood and have moved out. But what will remain with you until your dying day is slime.
Slime is a phenomenon. There are slime books and TikTok people with millions of followers doing slime things. It comes in a wild variety of colours. You can add in other ingredients, such as googly eyes or – nightmare scenario – glitter.
Consisting of polyvinyl acetate glue, food colouring and a sinister-sounding “activator”, it can be bought in any shop, without the need for a special licence. Even more disturbingly, it can be made at home. You’d think the instructions for that kind of thing could only be found on the dark web, where you can learn how to print a gun. But no: it’s everywhere.
You can find all sorts of video depictions of slime going horribly wrong: kids putting their face into it, or more alarmingly, rubbing it into their hair. Once in contact with hair, there’s no known way to get it out. The hair has to go.
There are many online instructions claiming to demonstrate the “easy” way to remove slime. Don’t believe it. It’s Maga-level disinformation. As soon as slime comes into contact with water, hot or cold, it hardens to a consistency that can resist armour-piercing bullets. We should cover our soldiers in the stuff. They’d be indestructible.
[ Are your eyes glued to slime too?Opens in new window ]
Like most kids, Daughter Number Four has been sucked into the slimosphere, and, naive fools that we were, we enabled it: realising too late that she was in the grip of something akin to a manic addiction. Within the blink of an eye , it was slime everywhere, all the time. And despite her earnest promises to be careful, it got into every nook and corner.
We’ve avoided any major hair debacles, but our sofa was soon strafed with puddles of the stuff, which even Herself – who has ninja-level cleaning skills – couldn’t get rid of.
Just this week, we had to get a guy to come in with Nasa-level equipment to get rid of it. Which he did. Most of it anyway. It cost a fortune to get done: just slightly less than the cost of buying a new couch. We’ve scoured the house for any packets of slime Daughter Number Four may have hidden. She looks at us levelly and says there are none left. But we’re not sure if we can believe her any more. That’s how bad it gets. The breakdown of trust. Ruined carpets and broken hearts. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.