Let’s do this together

“Did your skirt shrink in the wash then?” I asked The Dark Lord pointedly as she arrived home from school yesterday looking very different to the neatly dressed young lady who left the house that morning.

“No I’ve rolled it up to make it shorter,” she said bluntly, looking me in the eye and daring me to pass further comment.

“Heeeey it’s not my fight,” I said, throwing up my hands. “My job is just to supply you with the correct uniform and deliver you to school.

“If you choose to circumvent that uniform in the time-honoured fashion of hitching it up and showing your bum, then that’s between you, the headmaster and the Ghosts of Suffragettes Past!”

She shrugged off her school backpack, which weighs the equivalent of a small car, and then kicked off her shoes – except they weren’t school-compliant either.

“Oh and I see you’ve chosen to become a cliche and rebel against stuffy school rules by wearing black Nike Air Force trainers, that well-known revolutionary brand worn by 20 billion other teenagers,” I said snidely, before ducking back into my home office.

I heard her clattering around in the kitchen looking for a snack, slamming cupboards open and shut.

“Is there anything to eat?” she whined, sticking her head round the door.

“Same as always. Decaying fruit in the bowl,” I replied, while typing “cute kitten memes” into Google.

She stood there for a second or two, and then said cuttingly: “For your information, Mother, the school skirts are too tight so we pull them up, and my school shoes are uncomfortable. I can’t bend or run!”

So I took a look under her grey A-line school skirt and was surprised to find it had a pencil skirt lining which forces the girls to hobble, knock-kneed, like 1950s secretaries.

“Hold on,” I said. Coming back with a pair of sharp scissors, Jesse looked at me in horror as I cut the seam on her lining up to the waist.

“How are you going to run for Prime Minister one day if you can’t even run in your school uniform?” I said, waggling the scissors at her and sounding very wise.

Then I went back to watching kitten videos. Email me at siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk or write to Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.

Yours, Siobhan