It was excellent, let me tell you: thanks to my mother, I was able to experience my first nightclub, my first drink and subsequently my first pass-out due to alcohol complete with vomiting and a hangover, my first kiss with some random twenty-year-old at a bar and a lot of other firsts before I was eighteen and legally allowed to do all that. Of course, those things also occurred because I had a raucous bunch of friends, who all had equally inattentive mothers and fathers – but I will award my mother as the sole proprietor of most of those events.

Truth be told though, it still bothers me. We can’t even go away without her being attached to that thing the whole time. She even types on the computer, trying to do work or write emails whilst on the phone, even though the conversation that follows is hollow and distracted. She’s not very good at multi-tasking.

All I know is that my kids, if I have any, won’t ever have to put up with me having a phone glued to my ear. I’ll at least use loud speaker.