THE mother-daughter relationship is a tricky old business. Most of us love our mums to bits but are still driven to the brink of dementia if we spend more than one hour in their company. It's not so much a love/hate relationship as a love/get-out-of-my face-old-woman-before-I-scream relationship.

The same doesn't tend to happen with dads. They are usually too busy tinkering with something that doesn't need tinkering with to worry about tinkering with your life. Mums, on the other hand, know precisely which buttons to press.

Now that I have a daughter of my own, I can't help wondering when the time will be right for me to start driving her up the wall. I suppose I might be doing it already. Maybe at seven weeks old she is already tut-tutting about my choice of clothes for her ("If you think this bib goes with this vest mother, you can think again") and muttering under her breath about my constant meddling ("Have you ever thought that I might not want my nappy changing? I'll have you know it's very fashionable to smell like the sole of a sewage worker's welly").

Another thought keeping me awake at night, in between Munchkin Minor's vociferous demands for grub and attention, is whether my daughter will grow up to be just like me. I know it's a terrible thing to wish on such an innocent little creature, but it could happen.

When I was younger, back in ye olden days when Tony Hadley and Kim Wilde were celebrities and not just some saddo has-beens willing to paint their bottoms blue and waggle them for the cameras if that's what it takes to get back on the telly, I was absolutely nothing like my mum in any way whatsoever.

She never stopped talking, while I never said a word; she was constantly cleaning and tidying, while my room looked like The Rolling Stones had just trashed it; she drank bitter lemon, while I downed bitter; and she lived for bargain hunting and The Antiques Roadshow, while I lived for Leeds United and The Warehouse nightclub.

In fact, if we hadn't shared a terrace house and a last name, you would have been forgiven for thinking we weren't related at all.

But as I've got older (and none the wiser), things have changed. I'm pleased to report that I haven't become more like her, but, in a bizarre way, she has definitely become more like me. Or, rather, she has become more like I used to be when I was in my twenties.

While I now rarely leave the house unless it is a matter of life and death (or we run out of white wine), my mum is never at home. Just last week she went to a dance class, had lunch in the city with her best friend, went on a jolly with her women's group and enjoyed two nights on the town, one of which left her weaving along the road in an undignified manner after knocking back more glasses than she should of £50-a-bottle champagne.

I ask you, is this the behaviour of your average modern British grandmother? I certainly hope so. If it is, it means I can look forward to a life of fun and debauchery in the years to come when I freak my own daughter out by getting a life instead of meddling in hers.

Unfortunately, if she is anything like me, she won't appreciate it.

SO Saddam's missus and two of their daughters fancy swapping the delights of northern Iraq for the delights of northern England do they? Well, I say let them come. A night or two on one of Leeds' less salubrious estates might do them the power of good.

Bung Sajida (presumably Saddam's better half as it would be pretty difficult to be worse) and their lovely daughters Raghad Hassan and Rana Hassan in a terrace on Halton Moor, Gipton or Chapeltown and I guarantee they will be pining for the bombed out streets of Baghdad quicker than you can say "help, the neighbours are sticking weapons of mass destruction through the letterbox".

Updated: 09:26 Tuesday, June 10, 2003