last week I cut a statistic out of the newspaper, that teenage girls fall out with their mothers 150 times a year.

At risk of sounding smug and probably because she’s still only twelve, The Daughter and I managed to agree on something – that we clearly aren’t as bad as we thought, despite my apparent propensity to bring shame on the family.

This weekend we went to a local Summer Fete which was more grey and chilly than summery. I suppose advertising a Grey Chilly Fete might not attract the same number of visitors but I don’t know where they’d stand under the Trade Descriptions Act.

Either way, it was busy, with a few stalls at which the boys threw sticks (the locally traditional game of Aunt Sally rather than displays of antisocial behaviour), others selling brightly-coloured crocheted goods and hand-beaded necklaces, and an arena of hay bales packed with dogs, falcons and other beasts where The Middle One, having been assured he wouldn’t die of a poisonous snake bite, braved a python around his neck.

And then we hit the climbing wall. I’ve done a touch of climbing before so when faced with a plastic tower scaled by four-year-olds as merry as a merry-go-round and heavily safe-guarded with wires and harnesses, I hadn’t expected to be terrible. But I excelled at it – the ‘being terrible’ not the ascent.

It was an inauspicious start as I set off with the helmet on backwards and realising only as I lifted the first leg that I was wearing flip-flops which, however pretty, are not normally the first choice of footwear for explorers shinning up the North Face of the Eiger.

I’d said I’d go up to accompany The Youngest who’d been keen to have a turn, and he was off, up to the top of the rock column at speed, leaving me clinging on for dear life to a couple of plastic blocks eighteen inches off the ground. You can imagine The Daughter’s embarrassment at my inadequate performance, adding as I descended back to ground level, one more mark on the mother-daughter disagreement tally.

We may yet prove statistically normal after all.