Revenge is a dish best served cold...

Having four children is tough going. They keep us awake at night, on our toes with never-ending demands, constantly criticise our parenting efforts, wreck our house and do their best to eat or destroy everything in their path.
When quietness descends on the house and the dust settles after a busy day, the husband and I often utilise the hour after they all go to bed to contemplate how we can exact revenge for these years of torture.
We smile as we plan ahead, years ahead. We may very well be old and grey when we get our own back. But revenge is indeed a dish best served cold. And we will serve a big bowl of freezing cold spaghetti carbonara, much akin to the substance Finn spilled down the back of the sofa, when our time comes.
We have made a vow to get them back for all the hair-greying, wrinkle-producing, stress-headache inducing tactics they have used to make our lives more ah, colourful. Regardless of where they are in the world, we will travel, we will have our revenge, our day will, as they say, come.
Say our oldest boy is all grown up, living in a big fancy house with a posh wife and a lovely car out front.
Pensioner versions of the husband and I will turn up at his house. We will eat spaghetti bolognaise on his fancy white sofa, covering everything within a metre radius in that nasty red sauce that never comes out. When he shouts at us to stop wiping our hands on his nice cushion covers we'll tell him to catch himself on that it’s only a stupid cushion.
On overnight visits we shall call him into our room approximately every 36 minutes to furnish us with fresh glasses of water, tissues and perhaps a new duvet cover because the one with the dinosaurs on it is really scary. We shall also put in requests for stories about aliens and spend the rest of the night in his bed because aliens are far scarier than dinosaurs.
In the morning the husband and I will spend 45 minutes swinging our clothes around our heads, kung-fu kicking each other and refusing to brush our teeth instead of getting dressed and ready to go back to the old folk’s home, thus leaving him late for his fancy job.
Also, we will throw up in the back seat of his fancy car so that he goes to work late and stinking of vom.
After we have completed our torture of Daniel we shall move on to his younger brother, whom, I am confident, will also have a fancy job, wife and car.
We shall begin our reign of pensioner terror in his kitchen where the husband - grey, old and decrepit as he will then be - will attempt to forcibly part kitchen
cupboards from their hinges. We will both eat everything at and below eye level and within reaching distance, then complain loudly and with bewilderment about feeling sick. We will also ask 10 questions in succession and not listen or care for the answers.We will follow him and his fancy wife around the house asking for more food and whining that we are literally weak with hunger. We mat well rock the TV back and forth until it falls off and smashes on the ground for no reason other than it’s just there.
Then we will make our way to our youngest boy's place of work. While the pensioner version of the husband distracts him by asking him to fill a sink with water and bubbles so he can dunk random stuff – remote controls, loaves of bread, cordless phones ¬– in, I will jam a jammy-covered DVD into his computer disc drive. I will also lie in wait until he has completed, but not saved, a very long and important document then pounce and switch the computer off at the wall.
When he brings us to his, no doubt, fancy abode we will attempt to blow up his kitchen by placing canisters of deodorant into his oven. We shall also busy ourselves eating dog pellets before being sick on his living room carpet.
The baby girl – who by this stage will be a beautiful and successful young woman – we will keep awake for three-week stretches by calling her on the phone at 10-minute intervals throughout the night
There's plenty of time yet to imagine methods of torture that wouldn’t look out of place in a Jean Claude Van Dam movie. Our brain cells and memory may well diminish with age but these pages will serve as a constant reminder and detailed record of days, and torture, gone by.