Teenagers are such difficult burgers!

Teenagers are generally lazy, thoughtless, stroppy and uncommunicative . . . and that's just their good points.

Generally, attempts to discipline them are usually pretty lame. Most criticisms, however diplomatic, tend to be met with the mumbled "whatever" or "stop going on" followed by the obligatory rolling of the eyes.

But even by our standards, my wife's latest attempt to tick off our 17-year-old was, frankly, useless . .

I walked into the living room just as she was about to slam down the phone handset to hear her declare angrily "well, you're just going to have to eat every last one of those beef burgers yourself!"

She then explained to me how our son Joe had "thoughtlessly" taken a box of frozen beef burgers out of the freezer and forgot to put them back.

Now they had defrosted, so their shelf life was limited. "We'll probably end up chucking half of them out," she groaned.

"Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing Gordon Brown has been going on about," I said. I was trying to be supportive, but it came out sounding like sarcasm.

Meanwhile, Joe simply couldn't understand what all the fuss was about; couldn't appreciate that he'd been wasteful; that burgers cost money and that kids were starving in Africa etc. . .

My wife was wearing her best stern look. "I told him he had better eat all the burgers," she said.

Just as that sentence tapered off she caught a look in my eye. The kind that only an overgrown teenager can deliver.

"I know what you're thinking, but he'll soon get fed up with beef burgers by the time gets into double figures," she insisted.

I wanted to laugh, but to do so would have displayed a definite lack of solidarity. So I nodded sagely. Then I stifled a laugh and it emerged as a kind of snort. Then, thankfully, Ann was laughing too.

"So let me get this straight," I said. "His punishment is to eat nothing but burgers until they're all gone?"

"Yes. That's a really crap isn't it?"

It could have been worse, I guess. We could have insisted he has chips with them too.

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