Send more euros? Sorry, darling, I can't quite hear you My 15-year-old son left for tennis camp in Nice last Sunday, with strict instructions to text me on arrival. By Tuesday, I hadn't heard from him, nor could I get through to him. By Thursday, it seemed clear that this radio silence was thanks to the fact that the O2 network was down, until I discovered he was on T-Mobile - but still, my husband continued to say things like: "When I was 18 I went off to teach in Ghana in February and didn't speak to another white man, let alone my mother, till October." By Thursday night we had decided that, whatever, it was very character-building for him to be out of range from us for a while. Indeed, I was just beginning to appreciate all the growing up he was doing in a foreign country, on his own, when my mobile suddenly rang, with an 00 33 prefix. He was calling from the office of the camp manager. "Mum," he said, as I emoted, "the tennis is great. It's hard work. But it's great. And the weather's great, and the golf. But then a catch came into his voice. But the food is horrible! I'm literally STARVING! There's no air conditioning! The beds are RANK and..." Then he started saying that if I paid a supplement, running into many hundreds of euros, he and another boy could move into a four-star hotel off-campus. At this point, I acted swiftly and did what any loving mother would do in the circs. "Darling, I can't hear you," I cried. The signal... you're breaking up... darling...? Undeterred, he chased his call with an email listing the deficiencies of the camp in eight bullet points, and attached two images as visual aids. Which makes me think that my parents had it easy. When I was a child, there was no way of communicating to anyone who might care that the conditions were intolerable, so you all just got on with it. Three cheers for Mayor Gallus Strobel, who has decided to give parking spaces in the Black Forest town of Triberg male and female symbols. This is a great scheme, in principle. I don't like reversing. And I used to drive a Ford Granada the size of Canada, which I once effortlessly wedged between two pillars in an underground car park, and sat grinding gears and gouging the sides in tears for hours until a "kind man" helped me. When people ask me what I liked about living in America, I always answer that it was mainly the fact that you could park anywhere and the spaces were always super-sized. But what about here? Two thirds of traffic in cities is people driving round and round looking for somewhere they can leave the car, without being slapped with a fine or towed. In London, it wouldn't matter if the parking spaces were male, female, lesbian, gay or transgendered. There's still nowhere to park. May I offer my fellow middle-aged women readers a tip? If you want to feel particularly vibrant and female, try the male, members-only Garrick Club. I'm probably breaking any number of rules here, but on Tuesday, I met my father for Pimm's in the bar, and then, together with Lord Lamont, we trickled down to the dining room, where, over plaice, I suggested both men join Twitter. Norman said he wouldn't like "having to write back" to everyone, at which point my father, who seemed keener, got out a pen and paper. "I'm not sure I'm allowed to do this in the dining room," he said, as I explained about retweeting. Max Hastings and a sea of white-haired men in salmon-and-cucumber ties regarded the improbable scene impassively, but I had a whale of a time. As Emma Soames once said of going on a Saga cruise, "The lengths to which one will go to be the youngest person in the room!" Rachel Johnson is editor-in-chief of the Lady