‘One hundred and forty pounds,’ she muttered. ‘There can’t be more than ten pounds’ worth of fabric in it.’

‘At most,’ I replied. ‘At the absolute most.’

‘You never like anything I like,’ Mum said as she hoiked herself back into the dress, jiggling her breasts back into place while I silently prayed to the goddess that my boobs would be as tenacious as my mother’s. ‘And it’s my party, I want to wear something fun.’

‘I know strippers are really having a moment right now but I don’t think that’s the look you should be going for at the vow renewal,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you try on that nice lace one I pulled out?’

Mum turned and looked at the very respectable periwinkle blue lace sheath I’d selected.

‘Don’t take this the wrong way but it’s hideous,’ she declared, snatching back the curtain to her cubicle in disgust. ‘The queen mother would think it was too frumpy.’

‘The queen mother’s been dead well over a decade.’

‘And she still wouldn’t wear it.’

The curtain flew open again, revealing a bright green mini-dress with balloon sleeves and a slit running all the way up to her left hip, rendering any and all underwear unwearable. Very early period J.Lo if early period J.Lo made her own clothes out of Muppet remnants.

‘It’s all right for you,’ she said as she paraded out the cubicle and proceeded to strike an assortment of poses in front of the mirror. ‘You’ve always been able to wear whatever you want and get away with it.’ I looked down at my eighteen-year-old jeans and dodgy trainers and wondered where she was going with this. ‘That’s because my generation fought for you to have that freedom, freedom we didn’t have!’

Narrowing my eyes, I finished my coffee. ‘Mum, you were a teenager in the seventies, not during World War One.’

‘Well, I wasn’t allowed to wear whatever I wanted when I was a teenager,’ she sniffed before lowering into a squat and attempting to twerk. ‘And when I left home, I went straight into teaching, which meant I had to dress respectably in and out of school. There would have been hell to pay if the head had seen me dancing at Park Avenue on a Saturday night, dressed up like a dog’s dinner. And as soon as I had you, I had to dress like a mum. What does that even mean, dressing like a mum? I’m sixty years old and I’m dressing for myself for the first time. And I like this dress.’

The fourth-wave feminist in me wanted to stand up and cheer but the eternal child just could not get over the fact that I could one hundred percent see my mother’s vulva.