Sounds familiar? Introducing our new Thursday column, Diary of a Desperate PTA Rep. Follow her as she treads a path flanked by bake sales, syllabus evenings, and the fun and games of trying to keep Dear Boys 1 and 2 on the straight and narrow, and out of the expulsion list.

In my defence, it wasn’t a role I ever sought. I laughed my head off at Organised Friend who was a clear shoe-in, and in an unprecedented move was given the nod before her first child had even started nursery (something to do with arranging a show round the Roald Dahl exhibition before it had opened to the public). But me? I was asked to stay back after morning school pick-up. I assumed that Dear Boy Two had got busy with the glue pot again. ‘We’ve something to ask you’, head asked shiftily. I fixed a bright Little Miss Sunshine smile, inwardly working out the right answer to the statement: ‘perhaps Dear Boy Two would be happier in a nursery more suited to his talents’ (been there before – a similar line had been used many times years ago on one of my siblings). Head gazed out of the window, sighed, shook herself almost imperceptibly, then rallied and stared with the full force of eyes used to taking on 30 four-year-olds fighting for the last biscuit. ‘Would I take on the role of PTA rep?’ she asked in a voice that sounded almost as surprised as my face must have looked. My handbag thudded to the floor, as much in shock as I was. ‘You know I’m not massively organised’, I stuttered. Head sighed again and admitted, ‘Well (bouncing) Belinda has to return to Australia. And you’re the only one left who has been in the nursery longer than a term, and doesn’t have a job’. (Hmmmmm, since when did working nearly three days a week not count as ‘a job’?) She then used the killer line: ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful for Dear Boy Two to know that Mum is so closely involved in his early education’. Subtext: ‘Help us out and we’ll consider not throwing him out’. So I stepped over to the dark side.

I shuddered home, and vowed not to tell anyone who didn’t need to know. Not my mother, certainly not my sister, and definitely not Organised Friend. She’d be over with a lever arch file before I could ask how to spell ‘syllabus’. But I did vow to be more understanding with PTA gals in the future. And please, I beg, do the same. Perhaps they too had power thrust upon them, and don’t want to be the ones in the playground with the clipboard gaily corralling mothers to help out with the bake sale. She might be nice. She might be fun. She. Might. Be. Me.

Read every Thursday as Diary of a Desperate PTA Rep plunges ever deeper into the murky corners of a nursery in one of London’s leafier boroughs. And if you discover who she is, could you let us know?