I was supposed to be doing a car-boot sale this morning. I had my table booked and I was meant to arrive by six o’clock to display my wares – as it were. But, of course, I didn’t. The selection of designer clothes that Chelsea looked out for me remain inside their posh carrier bags.

My plans were somewhat curtailed by spending until five o’clock this morning in the Accident & Emergency Department of Milton Keynes General Hospital. Never the best way to spend a night.

Now Bobby is fast asleep in bed with his hand bandaged and a ton of painkillers. It isn’t broken, merely bruised – but his fingers are like sausages and his skin is black and blue, and that still looks bad enough to me.

My daughter, beige faced, is sitting at the kitchen table in front of me, nursing a cup of camomile tea. She’s wearing a pink fleece dressing-gown and a pair of zebra print slippers. On the surface, she looks little different than when she was four years old. Except, when she was four years old, she wasn’t capable of downing an entire bottle of vodka over the course of an evening.

I sigh inwardly.

‘This tastes gross,’ she complains.

‘Drink it,’ I say. ‘It will do you good.’

‘I don’t want it to do me good,’ she retorts. ‘I want to die.’

I slide into the seat opposite her. ‘And you might well have had your wish if Bobby hadn’t turned up when that chap was molesting you and robbing you, Ellen. What else might he have done to you?’

My daughter invokes the right to remain silent.

‘Why?’ I ask, genuinely baffled. ‘Why get so blind drunk that you don’t know what you’re doing?’

‘It’s just a bit of fun,’ she insists.

‘It isn’t,’ I tell her. ‘It’s potentially life-threatening.’

‘Did you think about it when you did that?’ She casts a disdainful glance at my foot in my big, blue boot.

‘That was a one-off – a mistake. And it was all your Aunty Lauren’s fault.’ That’s mainly true. Plus Lauren’s not here to defend herself so she’s fair game. ‘It’s not something that I do every single weekend.’

‘It might stop you from going to Peru,’ she points out. ‘So whoever’s fault it was,’ my daughter’s expression clearly reveals that she didn’t buy into my blame-shifting techniques, ‘it wasn’t very bright. Okay, I was well lashed last night, but it hasn’t ruined anything I was looking forward to.’

Then I seize on something that might be life-affirming for both of us. ‘Come with me to Peru.’

‘Get a life, Mum.’

‘Mothers and daughters often do bonding things together.’

‘Only mothers with daughters who don’t have a life.’