Where is HG Wells when you need him?

I've always been a grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side-of-the-fence person. I was always looking for the next job. When I was 9, I wanted to be 15; when 15, I wanted to be 18; when 18, 21; when 21, 25. Then I stopped wishing I were older.

I wish now I were any age or any place in life other than I am. I look in the mirror, and crepey eyes and jowly neck stare back at me. A lifelong sun worshipper, I now have the brown spots that go with it. The bulge is winning in my battle with it. My body aches and creaks every morning. When I try to increase my activity level, it moans and groans and sometimes screams out.

It's not just my body that I am dissatisfied with. I am sandwiched between elderly parents and curious teen-agers. I approach my weekly Sunday chat with my mother with trepidation. What illness has befallen her or her husband this week? Last week, she was in the hospital with chest pains again. While she was there, her husband slipped on ice while taking the garbage bin to the street and fell, laying there God knows how long till the mailman found him and lifted him up, then called the next-door neighbour, who is ill with cancer, who called his daughter.

My mother and stepfather are not the only ones I worry about. On Saturday, daughter had some friends round -- three girls and three boys. Only the boys were not the ones she had invited, or so she said. They were the ones who had left the urine-soaked toilet paper roll in the urinal at her birthday party. She knows what we think of them. Still, she risked sneaking them into our house, right under our noses. She also risked sneaking the bottle opener upstairs, and risked hiding four empty beer bottles and one WKD in a drawer in the playroom. She went to a friend's house for a sleepover after the party. Hubby and I were a bit suspicious, though we didn't quite know why. We knew the bad boys had been in our house and were very loud in our opinion of them so they left. After they had all gone, we went to check on the state of the playroom. Hubby, for some reason, pulled open a drawer, and there were the bottles. I called daughter and told her we had found the bottles and hubby was on his way to pick her up and bring her home. She's been very quiet since then, though one comment she made sounded like she's doing us a favour by being quiet. She blamed it all on one boy and said he'd been the only one drinking. Like I was born yesterday.

I suppose the worst bit of this is that we were home. This was done right under our smug noses. She has abused our trust, and I'm not sure if she even understands all the repercussions of this. No more parties, and certainly not with those characters. No laptop till the end of the month. And no more trust in her to do the right thing.

I hate this stage in my life. Transport me five years into the future, or five years into the past. Anywhere but here. I can't talk to my mother about this as she has her own worries. I have to be careful which of my friends I confide in or it could end up being broadcast across the Northwest of England. Hubby is disgusted and not much of one to talk to anyway. Just show me the time machine and get me out of here.