Is this one of life’s cruellest ironings?

THE Boychild has come home to make his triumphant return to the education system. He and assorted members of his friend network spent the summer in Berlin, doing everything tangible except learning German. And apart from the occasional requests for funding — I’m all for a slow adulthood — there are few things that focus the mind on achieving than time to appreciate what not achieving does not achieve.

Since his return, apart from a few days with his head in the fridge, he is all fired up about learning, doing, achieving. Part of this New Lou is tidiness and, sure enough, his room is eerily clean. He even cleared out his wardrobes in some spontaneous outburst of feng shui. I’ve come home to discover him emptying the dishwasher, vacuuming and cooking stuff that did not come out of a box.

I want to encourage him, but I don’t want to put him off by being OTT, so have walked a careful line in my responses. But I clearly slipped in the moderate response endeavour when he started the chat about annoyingly messy co-habitors. As he, my child for the last two decades, my very messy child for the last two decades, chatted about how annoying it was when people came to stay in your house and didn’t tidy up after themselves, the poker face started to slip. “You know, you try to keep the place tidy and people just leave their stuff lying around...” he continued in a tone of outrage. I wrestled with my face, my jaw kept trying to drop and I was having a real job keeping my eyes from popping out of my head. Something of the battle must have registered with the Boychild. He smiled and patted my struggling head, “It’s OK, I see the irony”. I got a shock. But then I realised he hadn’t said “ironing” — things hadn’t gone too far yet.