When you book your kid on a university open day, places tend to have a pretty strict specification: no more than one guest. Me and the middle teen kicked this around a bit, planning her trip to Bristol. Her friends could book their own place; it definitely wasn’t a cocktail party; so what kind of guest, exactly, did they have in mind? “They mean a parent. Didn’t you go with your parents?” Oh boy, no, we did not.

My sister and I used to tell our mum that one of us had to go to, say, Newcastle, and the other one should go too, in case she got lost. Then we’d trouser the train fare – even in 1990, it was a........

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