I SUDDENLY realised the other day that one of the most annoying things about being an adult is that you can't have a tantrum.

Or rather you can, but people either think you're drunk, totally immature or, if you are my age, beginning on the downhill slide to becoming totally ga ga.

Take the other night. I'd not had a good day, I'd overindulged on forbidden Easter goodies and consequently my stomach felt like a bongo drum, and the weather was cold and miserable. Consequently I got very tetchy over something very minor and we had 'words' in the house.

This, you may have gathered, is by way of an apology, but the point is that what I really wanted to do was throw myself on the floor, kick my legs up and down and bawl. Then I would have felt a lot better.

But you can't do that when you're 58, not unless you want people in white coats to arrive.

Children on the other hand handle stress so well. I watch my little grandson with great amusement as he moves so quickly from his usual sunny nature to a full fledged tantrum should someone thwart his ambition to bring his collection of earthworms into the house to examine on the dining room table.

I must quickly say, in the interest of not having more 'words', that he isn't prone to all that many tantrums, but he has some and within a few minutes he has totally recovered and not just because someone has handed him a dinner plate to put the worms on.

I dare say that child psychologists could explain, in not more than 5,000 words, why children have tantrums and whose fault it is. My gut feeling is that tantrums are perfectly all right because they allow a small child who is not capable of explaining anything in 5,000 words why he or she feels the need to draw attention to an injustice in the best and quickest way he or she can.

The best way to deal with a tantrum is to ignore it, which admittedly isn't easy if it is happening in the middle of Tesco's because you are sure to a get a small interested audience of tut tutters who all have their own theory on how to cope with a toddler who is screaming like a banshee.

Most of these theories seem to include a hand aimed at a small backside; not all that sensible when you think of it because if the little one has a sense of grievance because you won't let him or her load the trolley with 43 packs of Penguins he or she is going to have a whole lot bigger sense of grievance if delivered of a sore bottom in full view of a store full of people.

I personally have always found that bribery goes a long way to solving this kind of crisis. Not in the 'how to' books of child rearing but a handy tool in the armoury of parenthood.

Apart from getting grumpy on Monday night I enjoyed the long weekend, despite the weather. We all managed to get out in the garden and finally do some work and the children could get some fresh air.

With three generations in the house we have to have a garden which suits everyone and it's no use being annoyed if footballs roll into borders or little feet trample the edges of beds. You learn to choose plants for their ability to overcome being rolled on, crushed and occasionally uprooted. And we won't even think what the cats do to them.

I learned to love gardening as a child and I'm delighted to see my grandson is very interested in gardening although his 'helping' does occasionally involve the total destruction of a row of plants ever since I explained to him what weeds were (obviously not well enough).

He does help though. He puts things in the compost bin, picks up rubbish and stones and gathers up the gardening tools to put away.

I hope in years to come he will want his own little patch of garden and will begin a lifelong love of growing things.

I spent a lot of my childhood watching the gardener in the big house next door, so much so that the poor man probably got an 'I'm being watched' complex as I used to peer at him through the hedge. But I learned a lot as I watched him tenderly transplant seedlings and hoe his vegetables; prune the fruit trees and dig neat perfectly straight furrows in the ground. He wasn't quite the gentle son of the soil if you ventured into the garden though and would issue quite terrifying threats of burying alive any small children he caught near his plums or running over his asparagus beds.

Our own garden was oblong and rather boring, but my grandmother had a dear old friend who had the most wonderful cottage garden with flowers at the front and vegetables at the back.

The cottage was tiny, just two rooms downstairs and two upstairs; no bathroom and an outside lavatory. The friend, whose name I can't recall but who was definitely a 'Miss', spent all her time tending the garden and the front was a mass of old fashioned cottage flowers; delphiniums, hollyhocks, daisies, old roses and dozens of other plants.

At the back there was soft fruit; big red gooseberries and fat blackcurrants which the old lady didn't mind me tasting, and straight rows of vegetables including those very tall maincrop peas you don't see now, French and runner beans, carrots, a patch of potatoes and just about every thing you could want. Cottage gardens in those days were often huge and could, and did, feed a family all year.

The old lady frequently gave my grandmother baskets of produce which my mother was very grateful for, until she discovered that the old lady's secret gardening aid was a special sort of compost. The contents of the bucket from the outside loo. Environmental health officials would have been down there in droves nowadays but then it was quite acceptable.

Not to my mother, however, who never ate so much as a carrot from the old lady's garden after that. She was rather a sensitive soul, my mother. She shivered with horror for years when she recalled that the first home they had in the village, before I was born, had been a cottage with a similar small outhouse, and one with a gap under the door so you could see people's feet as they sat down. This, and the fact that there was only a latch on the door and no bolt on the inside, sent her off househunting the moment they moved in.

Years later I used to tell her a wonderful old country joke about an ancient cottager trying to rent his cottage to a couple of townees. The woman complained that there was no key to the lock on the outside lavatory and the old man helpfully pointed out that he had 'lived there for 65 years and never lost a bucket of s... yet'. I'll swear that woman was my mother.