"OOH!"

Having Mums that didn't work outside the home, as many of us did as kids of the Seventies, could cause real problems if you wanted to bunk off school for an afternoon. Sneaking back to my house was out of the question as my own Mum was always there, scrubbing her net curtains in the bath, gassing to our elderly neighbour over the fence or preparing the evening's particular narrow variation on her unique boiled beige cuisine.

Going to Veronica's was out of the question for similar reasons - her Mum was the last one standing who donned a cheery pink apron every morning and appeared to love nothing more than to dance around their house with a feather duster and a bit of James Last on the stereo, possibly stopping to Fight the Flab with Terry Wogan at 10am.  Jo's place was a different prospect, as her mother had died when she was twelve and her father worked all the hours he could, but we never liked going there as the house was a frightening monument to his misery. Between them they just about kept it clean, but the little touches we all recognised from our own Mothers' vigorous input were starkly absent; no background smells of scent or baking, crusts of dust appearing unnoticed on the lampshades, a brass letter box turned black through want of a little Brasso. We didn't want to be reminded of what could happen once a Mother had died, much as we complained about our own.

So that just left Claire's house, which was ideal in every way for a spot of truanting. Claire's Mum was soft and round and smelt just right - sweetly floral perfume, (but nothing disturbingly sexy like Jackie O'Keefe's Mum, who'd been the first woman we ever knew to adopt YSL's Opium.). Claire's Mum baked at weekends - the lingering smell of her fruit scones, combined with traces of her innocent scent, made for an agreeable welcome as we sneaked in through the kitchen door at 2pm. She kept a clean comfortable house with central heating so we wouldn't be cold, and best of all she worked as a school secretary so her hours kept perfect pace with our own. We loved Claire's Mum.

And we quite loved her Dad, too, a well-spoken Barrister's Clerk with a passion for high tech hi-fi and for keeping a fabulously well-stocked home bar. Claire's Dad's bar stood proudly in the corner of the living room, resplendently lagged in a thick tweed fabric which clashed only mildly with their purple shag pile, and from where we stood it seemed to virtually plead with us to taste its wares.

Which was how come we always ended up playing drinking games, with the amazing stereo system enlisted for technical support. Claire's house was a palace of pleasure that was made for nothing else on those illicit afternoons. Our favourite drinking game was called 'Headphones', and was even less sophisticated than the name suggests. You were required to don Claire's Dad's breathtakingly expensive Bang and Olufsen headphones and a record was placed on the turntable, to which you would be required to sing along at the top of your voice. When you stumbled over a lyric or forgot the words, the breathtakingly expensive headphones would be whipped violently off your head by the designated 'Headphone Master', and you would have to drink an eggcup full of their chosen spirit. Advocaat, Cherry Brandy, Ouzo (Claire's parents were so cosmopolitan they took regular foreign holidays)...you knocked it back in one. If you managed to complete a whole song with no mistakes, you were allowed to give the Headphone Master a dead leg.

Various songs will always take me straight back to that room, and in my mind's ear I will always be able to hear the terrible noise of a half-pissed fifteen year old schoolgirl, either tunelessly intoning the words in a bawled flat monotone (Claire), or labouring foolishly under the illusion that she can actually sing this one properly, and really going for those high notes with her eyes closed, trying to drown out the sounds of her chums' hysterical laughter as she strains for that tricky key change (er, Me.). Top tunes were Radar Love (we liked doing the drum solo), Peter Frampton's 'Show You the Way' (endless fun to be had from miming the mouth-tube thing he used), anything by X-Ray Specs or Ian Dury, and this one here, which was my personal favourite because I really believed I could sing it well. Until those three other bitches presented me with the recording they'd secretly made of me doing it. I still have the cassette somewhere. You'll never hear it.

I'd like to think that wherever you are, whoever you're with, and whatever you're doing, you might just like to stop right now, plug your earbuds into your machine, and give me a good uninhibited rendition of this fantastic song*. And if you get to the end without a mistake, there's an eggcup full of Noilly Prat waiting here at my house for you. My Mum won't be back for ages.
*It's actually very hard to sing. I just tried. Awful.