There are lots of things you’re told about motherhood. The lack of sleep, the alteration of home to soft play area filled with bits of plastic, and the horror birth stories (and why do some mothers love the car crash retelling of the delivery room?). There’s also lots you don’t hear about. Or more likely, choose not to hear. Footloose, fancy free and in your early twenties, how could you imagine fishing inside a full loo for a vital piece of Lego? Or going out of the house with a pipecleaner as a hair band because the children have used your hair slides as battle pieces. Some truths are too awful to contemplate. So having got my head (the one adorned with pipecleaners) around the request to become a PTA Rep, I’d almost talked myself into believing it would be fun. A chance to really get to know the other mothers. An excuse to call a gossip post drop-off a ‘meeting about this year’s charity’. And then I found out about the nit check. Is it me, or am I naive not to realise that checking children’s heads for wee, not-so-timorous blood-sucking beasties was part of a PTA remit?

Forget networker, I’m now a nitworker. One of my new weekly roles is to rifle through Dear Son 2’s classmate’s heads to see if anything is lurking. I got the class list, started parting partings and looking behind ears, and decided it wasn’t so bad. The process was almost soothing, apart from the odd scream from a particularly princess girl who thought her neat plaits were being mussed up. But in the second week, a child’s hair started moving. Not just a few eggs, but an infestation of crawlies. ‘Yeuch eeek’ I screeched inadvisably, bringing the attention of the entire class on to the scalp of child-we-will-call-Nigel. The nursery’s policy is for the nit-head to be sent home, with discreet (sorry about the screech…) note to each parent to keep on the lookout. I was dispatched to deliver happy tidings to ‘Nigel’s’ mother. ‘Impossible’ she declared, ‘I checked this morning, and we are very rigorous about this kind of thing’. Stalemate was quickly reached as she said no one would be at home to look after Nigel, so even if he did have nits – which she doubted – he couldn’t come home anway. So what next? I decided to pass on advice of Smartest Friend (her second home is a castle, don’t you know). Her attitude is that nits are a healthy part of an upbringing of benign neglect, and being allowed to roll around with ponies/dogs/hundreds of acres. Not getting nits, she reckons, is therefore suburban and antiseptic. Amazingly, ‘Nigel’s’ mother fell for the ‘nits prefer upper-class heads’ spiel, and decided she could come and pick up her little prince after all. And the next day I overheard her telling a mum that, ‘Apparently, those little Beckhams couldn’t get nits because their hair is too short’.

Future career as a diplomat, that’s me. Once I can stop itching my head, that is.