In the time it takes me to bring J a cup of tea Daughter Number One has taken my place.

"That's my side of the bed," I point out.

"I can't move," she groans.

"Are you by any chance suffering, darling?" I ask.

She doesn't even have the energy to answer. She just turns over to face the other way.

Sunday morning. Eight hours earlier I had picked her up from the pub. Drink had clearly been taken. The alcoholic variety. She had giggled all the way home.

It had been a good night. A birthday celebration. Hers. She's now nearing the end of her teens. "Already?" I keep thinking to myself.

Said birthday actually happened on the Friday. We'd taken her out for dinner in Bridge of Allan, an evening I spent at the end of the table half-missing the conversation and half-following President Obama's speech in Charleston on the TV above our heads instead. On teletext. [1]

That was her doing her family duty. Saturday was about her friends. Far more important. Only now she is suffering for it.

That's why she is in with her mum. Someone who knows what it feels like to have a head swirling like whisky in a barrel. Her smug, mostly alcohol-free dad [2] doesn't know what she is going through.

J used to tell me that the fact that I didn't drink was one of her regrets. It would be nice to have someone to get drunk with, she used to say. These days she doesn't drink much. I have never dared say it's nice to have someone not to get drunk with. I think that might get me hit.

"You'll not be wanting to go out today then?" I say to Daughter Number One. It's a couple of hours later. She is still in bed. The rest of us are ready to head out. She can just about shake her head to suggest that the answer is no.

We leave her to her hangover. In Glasgow we go for something to eat in a bar which is hosting a DJ gathering. I have crispy electro banging away in my ear as I scoff a goats' cheeseburger. Looking around I may be the oldest person here, I reckon. Apart from J and her mum. Daughter Number Two says her sister would love this. She probably would. Then again, it might make her headache worse.

Later we pop into Waterstones for a cup of tea. That's what you do when you're as old as me. You drink tea all the time.

I meet an old colleague I used to work with in a bookshop in Stirling. "In October I'll have been in bookselling 25 years," he tells me. "I still remember my first day and you telling me what to do, Teddy."

I'm just taking in that number. 25 years. That's almost half my lifetime ago.

Suddenly, I think, it's me who could do with a drink. A strong one, preferably.

[1] It is a measure of his speech-giving abilities that even on Teletext it was emotive.

[2] I am partial to the odd white wine and the odd G&T if I'm not driving. But given where we live I'm always driving.