Becoming a mother is an assault on every one of your senses, it’s an exercise in surviving mental torture and has a learning curve that puts a banana to shame. Yet, at the same time I learnt so much about such specialised things that, if you pitted my knowledge against the general public’s on the same subject and you would have to concede that I, in the context of the wider world, was a childcare expert, and really that’s something that more mothers should learn to be proud of (Gina Ford, eat your heart out).