In our house, Wednesday teatime is the BEST teatime of the week.

What makes Wednesday so good is that Mum cooks up ‘A Real Taste of Italy’. It’s made with fresh pasta and hand-picked tomatoes with an exciting blend of herbs and covered with a rich cheese sauce. Each serving also contains 377 calories, 13 grams of fat and 832 mg of sodium (whatever that means).

How do I know all this? Because that’s what it says on the box. YUM!

We love teatime out of boxes. Even Dad can’t cook it wrong, apart from the time when he forgot to poke holes in the top with a fork and it went BADDOOF in the microwave. The smell lasted for weeks! Mum went mental with him, but secretly she was dead pleased because when her friends came round they thought she’d been cooking some posh stuff like they do on telly.

‘What IS that lovely smell?’ said the friends.

‘It’s my new secret recipe,’ said Mum the Big Fibber.

Gosh if I told whoppers like that, I’d be straight up to bed with no arguing.

The bad thing is that we can only have box tea on Wednesdays, because Wednesday is the only day when there are four of us for tea. The box says serves four and WE MUST OBEY the box.

So anyway, one Wednesday we were all sitting round the table waiting for our exciting herbs and 13 grams of fat. The four of us were Mum, Dad, me and little sister Tilly. As usual, Tilly was dressed as a fairy and she was watching the numbers on the microwave count down so she could do her magic spell at the end.

‘Five, four, three, two, one . . .’ said the fairy then she waved her wand.

PING! went the microwave oven.

Dad got the plastic box thing out and peeled the top back. Oh wow, smell that smell, love it love it. He was just dolloping it out on to four plates when we heard an evil scraping sound coming from outside.

The front gate squeaked and the scraping sound got closer, and then the front door burst open. A hideous creature covered in mud staggered into the hallway leaving a slimy trail all over the mat.

‘UM OME!’ wailed the creature.

‘Oh no!’ said me and Tilly. The last thing we had wanted to see was the Mud Creature from Planet Smelly, but there it was.

The Mud Creature had been playing football. Usually he had tea at his friend Matty’s house on Wednesdays but obviously something had gone wrong.

‘UM OME!’ he said again.

‘What’s he saying?’ asked Dad.

‘He says “I’m home”,’ said Mum, then she shouted into the hallway. ‘Don’t come in the kitchen like that.’

‘Like what?’ said the creature.

‘Like THAT!’ snapped Mum. ‘You’ll have to get undressed in the hall.’

By now you’ve probably guessed that the Mud Creature from Planet Smelly is actually my big brother James. This was not good news for me and Tilly. We started shovelling the pasta inside us as fast as we could because we knew what was coming next.

‘Did you get tea at Matty’s?’ asked Dad.

‘No,’ said the Creature. ‘He wasn’t playing today.’

Dad went to the cupboard to get another plate out.

Shovel shovel shovel went me and Tilly.

‘Wait, you two,’ said Dad. ‘We’ll need to save a bit for James.’

And sure enough Dad spooned a HUGE bit off both our plates and plonked it on a plate for the Mud Creature. UNFAIR. I just hope James got all my 13 grams of fat in his bit. It would have served him right.

After we had eaten our SMALL HELPINGS of box tea, Dad stood up and pulled an important face.

‘I’ll leave you people to clear up. I’ve got a bit of work to do in my office.’

Office? That sounds grand doesn’t it? I bet you’re thinking that Dad’s office has a big desk with lots of telephones and a giant window with helicopters outside.

Actually it’s not quite like that surprise surprise gosh faint in shock.

There’’’’boo hoo hoo