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Jenny Eclair shares 'one strict rule' she refuses to break with grandson Arlo

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Comedian has confessed that she's completely "besotted" with her two-year-old grandson Arlo, but insists on "one strict rule" when it comes to babysitting him.

"I didn't think I'd like him as much as I do," she admitted on Kaye Adams's How To Be 60 podcast. "It takes you aback, a bit."

Jenny says that she finds being a grandmother easier than found motherhood. "Children can be quite boring," she says. But at 64, she's enjoying the small things more than she did during her prime as an award-winning comedian and novelist. "Maybe it's because I've slowed down," she adds.

While she "likes a baby in the bed in the morning," Jenny draws the line at full-time care for "the light of her life". "I don't want too look after a baby full-time, and I don't do night times," she emphasises.

"I haven't done a sleepover, I don't want a child interfering with my nice glass of vodka and my telly in the evening so I'm quite strict about that."

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Currently, Jenny looks after Arlo every Tuesday. She explains: "We have him on Tuesdays ... I think one day a week is enough, quite honestly. I take him to a singing class, and he moves away from me when I start singing because he knows I can't."

Jenny confesses to being a "slave" to her two-year-old son Arlo's every whim and her husband Geof is no better. She adds: "Geof really likes the telly. He enjoys watching very young children's cartoons – it's slightly worrying. I have to make sure that Arlo's actually in the house and Geof isn't just watching them for his own sake."

Jenny reveals that sometimes she looks at Arlo and his resemblance to his mum – Jenny and Geof's daughter Phoebe, "hits her in the chest."

Now a successful playwright, Phoebe says that watching her mum perform helped her realise that "there's a where adults also play and don't have to grow up."

It's this ability to take childlike pleasure in things that strengthens Jenny's bond with Arlo – and with her daughter too: "I sometimes look at him and it's like 30 years has gone away... it could be the 1990s and it could be Phoebe again ."

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