The time when, aged two-and-a-half, she ran and tripped and hit her forehead on a chair leg, and after we got back from the doctor's I took her out in public with a purpling haematoma the size of an egg. The time when, aged three, after standing beside me in a hot, motionless railway carriage in the middle of Kentish countryside for 40 minutes, she finally shouted 'fucking train !' and I broke into appalled laughter, accompanied by no one. The time when we sat down at a wedding dinner with the drunken bridesmaid's seven-year-old daughter, who said "Mummy, asparagus makes you want to have sex," and for once it wasn't my problem that, when you don't know better, fragments of lives can be highly misleading.