One of the joys of children getting older is that birthday parties become less complicated.

There comes a point in a child’s life when they don’t really want to invite the whole class along any more, causing their parents to say "it’s up to you" but to really mean "thank you, thank you, thank you". Few things are more traumatic than children’s birthday parties, with that nagging feeling none of the kids will turn up, or will get bored and rebel, or it will prove to be a failure in any one of 100 other ways. That’s why children’s entertainers can charge the money they do. Early on in my parenting life I volunteered to organise the games and entertainment at my daughter’s birthday celebration.

I thought it would be pretty straightforward; instead it turned out to be utterly terrifying. I was once chased by a group of Nazi football hooligans during a riot, and that, frankly, was a more relaxing experience than looking into the faces of restless young children and realising they’ve found you out. Just like dogs have the ability to tell if you’re frightened of them, so small children can ruthlessly sense the adults who know how to entertain them, and the ones who are just pretending.

I got to the end of that afternoon pledging never again to put myself through that stress. From then on, it was a decent-sized cheque pointed in the direction of Coco the Comedy Clown, and his ilk. There were problems, of course.

We once paid for a visit from the Fun Bus, which was supposed to park outside the house and load the kids on board. Except then the Fun Bus got a not very fun engine failure and we had to find a children’s entertainer at short notice, which is even harder than it sounds.

We also had a magician who can barely actually do a trick, but still managed to beguile the kids. Then there’s the challenge of party bags. Do you fill them with those useless bits of plastic tat that masquerade as toys but actually live in the same basket as Christmas cracker gifts - basically unwanted rubbish that’s just waiting to be thrown away or sucked up by the vacuum cleaner?

Or do you go for a single gift - a book, or a toy car - in the certain knowledge some guests will take one look and then almost cry with disappointment. Frankly, it’s traumatic. But in all this time I’ve never had to deal with the problem that has so spectacularly emerged this week in Devon.

There, a family organised a party at the local dry-ski slope to mark their son’s birthday. One of the boys who’d been invited failed to turn up and so the family responded by sending an invoice home in his school bag, demanding £15.95 for the cost incurred. On the one hand, you have to admire the sheer chutzpah involved. Most British people tend to spend rather a lot of time thinking about the niceties of life, but not this lot. Nope, they’ve decided to trample right over the normal social niceties and demand payment for the money they wasted on, among things, a portion of jelly. In the real world, though, you just don’t do things like that. Like it or not, a party is a one-way process, where you carry most of the risk You pay the bills, you deal with the problems, and then you drink a large glass of wine that night as soon as the birthday boy/girl has gone to sleep.

What you try not to do is threaten to instigate legal proceedings against another parent. Yes, it’s very annoying when someone doesn’t turn up, but that’s life. And bearing in mind you probably didn’t charge the guests who did turn up, it seems a bit harsh to send a bill to the one who didn’t. Now we’ve moved on to smaller parties, family outings and even, in the case of my teenage daughter, a rather lovely dinner to mark her last birthday. It’s all much calmer and less scary, I’m still not sure if Slavisa Jokanovic is the manager Watford needed, wanted or just the one they ended up with.

They seem to bounce from brilliance to disappointment, but have recently shown some decent form. Then again, how can Matej Vydra have become such a neutered striker that he hasn’t scored in 11 games? How, too, did Lewis McGugan fade to such an extent that the club has made it clear he’s no longer wanted? When McGugan joined Watford, he went through a phase of being the best player in the team, controlling matches and passing the ball with a calm aplomb the team was lacking. Now he’s not even good enough for the match-day squad, even at a time when Jokanovic had talked of the need for more midfielders. And yet for all this, Watford have sometimes looked totally irresistible.

Troy Deeney looks fantastic, the away form is impressive and there are signs of real excellence. So is this a legacy of others, or because of Jokanovic? I guess the next four months will decide. I’m writing this on a train from London to Manchester. The man next to me is taking frequent phone calls and using an intoxicating blend of Yiddish and English. To my untrained ear, I’ve just heard the phrases "this needs a clean-up" and a very emphatic "you don’t even know your own telephone number" interspersed with long sections of Yiddish. The conversation ended with "now get it done... goodbye". I went to school with lots of boys who would use Yiddish at home and threw certain slang words into everyday conversation. Few languages have given us better words than shmaltz, glitch, klutz, spiel, shtick or chutzpah - which had already worked its way into this column.

Next time you find your way mooching around The Harlequin/intu on a Saturday afternoon, reflect that you’re not fed up - you’re just shlepping.