I feel curiously like James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree.

I should elaborate. My mum came to stay for a few days, en route to Switzerland and a sabbatical. Although she booked her flights a month ago, I didn’t write down when she was arriving, or in fact, from where. She was definitely flying into Luton, but I couldn’t remember if she was coming from Edinburgh or Glasgow, which meant I couldn’t easily look up the timetable and figure out her likely arrival time.

I also knew that we’d had an unfocused conversation a few weeks before about our local tube station, but I was aware that she wouldn’t know how to get to our house from there.

So Saturday night arrived, and my mum didn’t. We waited, increasingly worried about my little mum at large in the big city on a Saturday night. The last time she came to London, we were sitting on the top deck of a number six going down Oxford Street. A man wove up and down the aisle, with his hand outstretched. She tutted and said she couldn’t believe they let beggars on buses until I pointed out that it was actually the conductor…

She lived in London for years, she knows what a city’s all about, but she’s fixed in a Hebridean mode of living now. They do things differently, there, and she prefers it.

We expected her to ring from the airport, the station, the tube, or somewhere, but without a mobile, it’s easy to feel out of touch. When half ten rolled around, the doorbell rang, and there she was, completely fine.

At which point do our parents stop being parents, and we stop being their children? And at which point do these roles reverse?