My story starts with my being at Bath University for a technology based Open University summer school. My wife had dropped me off at the weekend and bounced home in our little green Mini which must have started things off as a couple of days later she had our identical twin girls a month early.

The same afternoon a group of the students were scheduled to visit Hinkley Point for an educational tour and I cadged a lift and they dropped me off near home. When the midwives at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton let my wife and the twins go home they were still tiny and were on 1½ hour feeds but were taking 1½ hours to drink it!

By the time we were back to getting a good night’s sleep they had started school where I was roped in for the fathers’ race at their school sports day. It started well until the elastic broke on my 1970s slip-ons and I tripped up, landing flat on my face. Lying on the grass with my nose pressed into the soil I distinctly heard a little girl in the crowd cry: “Look mummy , the fat man’s fallen down.”

The rest of their schooldays soon passed and it was time for University, where the first and last years are usually spent in halls on campus. The fun starts in the middle years where you have to find your own accommodation from an approved accommodation list from the college. I’m not saying these grasping landlords were tight but the first three storey house had been equipped with smoke detectors but none had ever seen a new battery so were chirping like an aviary of demented budgerigars when we arrived. At another the hot tap was dripping so fast it was almost a continuous flow. I said: “you had better get that fixed or your heating bills will be massive.” The landlord duly arrived and swopped the cold tap washer for the hot tap and the hot for the cold, thus fixing the hot leak but they had a cold leak for the rest of their time there.

Without exception none of these landlords ever returned their deposits usually saying they had to retain them until all the utility bills had been cleared and would send the money on – which of course never happened.

However in their final year of outside accommodation the twins got their own back. Being identical twins they worked a system so that both stayed at the one house but only paid one rent. They made sure only one at a time ever answered the door fooling the landlord into the belief there was just the one twin in the house.

One final snippet on the twins at University: arriving to pick them up at the end of the year, one of them looked battered and bruised. “What happened to you?” I asked. She replied: “It’s my own fault, we had a party to celebrate our exams ending, and I fell out of the shopping trolley when they were pushing me home.”

David Peek, Bridgwater