‘I could make my signature quiche . . .’ he suggested, barely looking up from his paperwork. ‘Although the recipe says to beat twelve eggs separately. That sounds too cruel, don’t you think? Maybe I could just reprimand them sternly,’ he joked. He joked!

‘No.’ Amber went into full persecuted, burn-me-at-the-stake Saint Amber mode – as he knew she would. ‘I’ll just rustle something up.’ Sitting duck, or sacrificial lamb? she thought darkly. Underdog in a chump sauce? Turning to head back to the scorched earth that had become her kitchen, she paused. ‘But why wasn’t the smoke alarm going off? Did you change the batteries like I asked?’

‘Oh, shit. Meant to, but then this case came up and it’s been all-consuming . . . Refugee crisis.’

Amber was very restrained – after all, she didn’t stuff Scott’s briefcase up his nose. She merely retreated to the kitchen while her domestically impaired legal eagle husband was in mid-humanitarian flow.

The second blow was delivered when her seventeen-year-old son, Justin, and fifteen-year-old daughter, Bella, trailed in from swimming training, hungry and on the sniff for supper. Amber, way behind schedule, asked them to help out by putting their dirty sports clothes in the washing machine.

‘Which one is that?’ Justin asked. ‘The top one or the bottom one?’

Mother looked at son, aghast. ‘Wait. You’re seventeen years old and you don’t know the difference between the washing machine and the dryer?’

‘Is it the one on the wall or the one on the floor?’ her son drawled.

‘Bella, will you please show your big brother which machine is which.’

‘Um . . . I would, but . . . I’m not sure either.’

Ruby was right; she might as well have ‘doormat’ stamped on her forehead.

Amber, who’d always maintained an attitude of detached and courtly irony towards her family, suddenly transmogrified into Attila the Mum. ‘I am sick of being taken for granted!’

‘Take a chill pill, Mum.’ Her son’s tone bordered on surly. ‘What’s wrong?’

Amber sighed with exasperation, ‘Oh, you know, life.’

Justin looked perplexed. ‘But I am your life, Mum.’

It was true that the kids were the glue that kept her marriage together, but, of late, things were coming unstuck. Perhaps it might help if she were to actually sniff their homework glue a bit more often. Amber loved her children with a passion, but tonight she found herself considering the guppy approach to parenting – that is, eating your young.