In my next life, I am going to be someone who plays my cards so close to my chest that you’ll be able to see the imprint of the seven of spades on my right boob.  No one is even going to know what I had for breakfast, let alone where I went for dinner and with whom. Not for me a line of dirty laundry flapping in the wind, greying bloomers for all to see. No one is ever going to raise their eyebrows at me and say, ‘Really?’ again, or suddenly scurry off in the middle of a convivial conversation because I’ve revealed some unappealing gem about the Fisher family.

I’ve noticed the nosiest people are those who hang onto every whisper of information about themselves. They feel quite free to ask ‘How much did you pay for your curtains?’, ‘Why didn’t you send your children to the same school as my child?’, ‘What did you vote?’, while blocking simple enquiries about where they went on holiday with an obfuscation worthy of a politician.

I’m going to keep secrets about things that I didn’t know were supposed to be secrets, like which maths set my son is in and his stunning failure in the art exam. I’ll become a match for the parents whose offspring regularly provide a sweep of A*s across the board but seal themselves up like a thermos flask the second a B-minus in embroidery darkens their door.

When I go to the doctor, the optician or the hairdresser, I’m going to be all mysterious with my friends and talk darkly about arriving a bit late to meet them because I have ‘an appointment’. God forbid anyone should know that I sit in a hairdresser’s chair and have all that grey dyed brown. Will they like me less if they know? So far they don’t seem to.

Other people trap stories about spousal disagreement, children’s misdemeanours and family skeletons like wasps under a glass. I manage, barely, to draw the line at things that might make people start looking at their watches and back away with their hands in the air, possibly retching as they go.

Maybe it’s just a lack of filter, allowing words out into the air before I’ve weighed up whether the audience really needs to know the gory details of my family life.

Or maybe when I’m actually saying the words, I don’t care what people think, though I do seem to mind more at four in the morning. By seven o’clock though, I’ve usually convinced myself that I’m not as important as I think I am, and if I provide everyone with a topic of conversation for ten minutes, I’ve done them all a favour.

Even if I could rein myself in, turn myself into one of those tight-lipped people whose children apparently clap their hands with glee when asked to empty the dishwasher, whose husband has to be torn away from the dusting, who have their Christmas presents wrapped by Hallowe’en, with sprinkles and bows and bells…would I be able to gag the rest of the family?

It’s not looking hopeful. When my daughter was asked to write an essay about her family as part of her entrance exam, she wrote ‘My mum is so naughty that I simply daren’t write any examples here.’

You decide…

The son is heading off on a 20km trek. Three weeks ago, we got a letter with the essential kit, which didn’t come to the top of my volcano of priorities until the end of last week, leaving a mere five days to find the compromise between the ‘nooooooo’ trainers which will enable the son to walk 20km without his feet rubbing up a storm and the must-have plimsolls with all the foot support factor of a Ryvita. This resulted in an Addams Family ding-dong in the shop in front of a bored assistant who would rather have been texting ‘KK’ to her friends or pulling blowfish faces on FaceTime than trying to help the mother with nine and half minutes left on the parking ticket corral the ‘whatever’ son into a suitable pair of shoes. Six more precious minutes tick by while the son carries on arguing that he won’t get anything, he’ll wear his ‘pastries’, which, in turn, inflames me further as I have no idea what ‘pastries’ are and can only imagine that something with lard as an ingredient is not going to be the pinnacle of sporting support.

With approximately thirty seconds to go until the traffic warden appears, the son – with the most hard done by face in the world – agrees to the most expensive trainers in the world in such a sulky manner that it is tempting to enjoy my own tiny moment of tantrum by refusing to buy anything at all and make him spend the day doing Latin translation, rather than walking with his friends. Manage to be marginally more grown up than the thirteen-year-old. Until we get to the till. Which isn’t working.

The manager slumps out from the stock room, prods a couple of buttons and disappears off to count insoles without bothering to wait to see if the till has actually come back to life. Which it hasn’t. Car park ticket overdue. Calculate the cost of car parking fine, plus the cost of trainers that the son doesn’t even want, versus the hideousness of walking out and having to go through the whole thing again. Leave, resolving that if this sports shop is the last sports shop on the planet, we will trek on bits of old tyres tied on with string rather than darken its door again. Hiss at son. (Still feel a bit hissy by the time we have to repeat the performance a couple of days later but owing to the shop assistant being young, trendy and interested, all is accomplished with minimal teeth marks.)

In the meantime, we need to make Saturn. With guilt in my heart, I decide that sports day (all day affair), plus end of term concert (last time my ability to turf children out with polished shoes will come under scrutiny – hurrah!), plus French Day (let me just grow some garlic, paint some stripes on a T-shirt and find a beret) equals no time for papier mache and just enough seconds to order a polystyrene ball from Amazon that we can paint. Except the polystyrene ball didn’t arrive until the day after it was required so we had to do papier mache in a big rush the night before, but without any of the things we needed…

So if any mother out there is reading this and feeling smug…please don’t leave a comment. On the other hand, if you need to knock up Mars or Jupiter…I’ve got a pristine polystyrene ball looking for a new home…