“Bye bitch,” shouts my teenage daughter loudly as she runs out of the house, slamming the door noisily behind her; and fleetingly, and not for the first time, I hope the neighbours haven’t heard her. But then again, who cares if they have? She gives me a cheeky grin through the sitting-room window, adjusts her baseball cap and saunters off down the road. Appearances can be deceptive: for some reason known only to her, my 19-year-old communicates mostly via aggressive-sounding Caribbean slang, much of it impenetrable to me.

I currently live alone with three young people aged 24, 19 and 16; my husband, their father, lives and works in another city, and my eldest daughter lives and works in another country.