Mirabel: OMG, wt 2 do want to cry coz sooo bored!!!
So boring where I live really miss London.

Seximonki14: gawjuz grrl, don’t b down, K? I no laods
who want 2b m8ts witu, and if u reli like them, then I
mite let them. OMG PIR!! Watch out PIR

Seximonki14: I warned u POS POS!

So I say to Mirabel, as a responsible parent should, ‘Er, darling, I hope you don’t think I’m out of line here’ – bright smile, reassuring pat – ‘and your personal life is your own, I know, but, er, do you know this seximonki person?’ At this point Casimir lets out a scornful laugh, as if it’s really sad that I might think that Mirabel would know anyone she was communicating with online, as if I were missing the point. ‘And what on earth is that language you are talking in?’

Mirabel explains in a long-suffering voice that seximonki14 is Char, a friend she’d ‘met’ online, as if all this is perfectly normal, they are talking in English and would I please go now.

I go into the kitchen to call Rose.

‘Not content with plastering her webpage with come-hither self-portraits she has somehow managed to upload herself, including one of her clad only in pants and bunny ears, Mirabel is now live to the nation on webcam,’ I whinge, as I lay the table. ‘I said, “Why isn’t there one of me, or dad, on your webpage, or Calypso even?” and she said, “You’re so not important in my Facebook life.” I mean, is this normal? I told her that if she wanted to attract every perv and pederast on the planet, she was going the right way about it, but she just sighed and carried on chatting to someone online whose screen name was “Sexi1-monkii4” and told me I didn’t know anything and she was, like, totally fine and would I chillax.’

‘I know,’ says Rose sympathetically, and I hear her taking a sip of her drink. I can hear the Archers theme tune – rum ti tum ti tum ti tum! – start up in the background. ‘But what can we do?’

‘I don’t know, Rose. And by the way, did you know that there’s a link to Ceci on Mirabel’s page, and the link says “Ceci mybestfriend” and underneath that it says, “We’ve had lesbian sex eight times”? What about that? Should we be worried? All I know is that at her age I was dressed by my mother in Laura Ashley smock dresses, and spent all my spare time lying on my bed reading Ballet Shoes and longing for a Labrador puppy. And, oh yes, what do the acronyms POS and PIR stand for?’

‘Parent in room and parent over shoulder, I think,’ Rose replies, distracted because she is an Archers addict and is longing for her fix.