I have to say once you get past how po-faced Zoe is, you kind of realise why she’s been winning all those awards all these years!” “Oh, I guess she comes on in a later episode, then. Mother paused, a little aware that she might have missed a turning a few sentences back, but plunged on bravely. “I thought you didn’t like Jessica Alba?” And the other day, she called to tell me she’s been utterly engrossed by Dark Angel. For instance, we’re all back in her will. Thankfully, the passing years have salved some of Mother’s wounds. “I think they’re leaving everything to an animal shelter,” I told Michelle. Jack took up surfing in Bali and later played backup guitar with some obscure rock band in San Francisco, and the day I announced I was leaving the law to become a journalist, that very afternoon, she dragged Father to the family lawyers to change both their wills. When Michelle became an accountant instead of a doctor on account of her aversion to blood, Mother pursed her lips and stared hard into the distance. When I graduated as a lawyer, it was like she had personally discovered the double cure for cancer and stupidity, but it was all downhill from there. Which is a long-winded way of saying that our mother pinned all her hopes for eternal maternal glory on her children. You’re getting your tubes tied,” she said to Father. “I don’t think I’ll ever be seen in public in a bikini ever again. “Being pregnant is such an awful experience!” she told everyone at Jack’s hundredth-day celebrations.

For a while, she entertained the idea of adding a fourth child as an architect, and a fifth as the Prime Minister of Singapore, but by the time my brother Jack was born, she was, in her own words, “so over it”. From the moment she said ‘I will’ to my father’s marriage proposal, Mother had fantasised of having a lawyer, doctor and banker in the family. I don’t mean to boast when I say that I am the only one of my parents’ three children who fulfilled their destiny.

Dark angel