It was, as I now know, a painful debriefing. What had the headmaster asked me? My parents, naturally enough, wanted to know how I had performed at the interview, since a place at the grammar school depended on it.

“Well,” I said. “He asked me what I did over the holidays.” And what had I told the venerable historian? I had presumably mentioned our fortnight in Northumberland, the walks along Hadrian’s Wall, the instructive visits to the Roman fort and the medieval abbey at Hexham?

“I forgot,” I mumbled. “I told him I hadn’t done anything.” I got the place anyway, probably because the head took pity on me and my drab, uneventful life. But now I know how my parents must have felt.

Last weekend, we took Alex to the newly-reopened Norwich Castle Museum. He spent an hour in the basement, learning happily how to construct arches out of sponge blocks and transporting Caen stone in toy boats across a model of the English Channel.

He growled at a stuffed tiger and peered down a bottomless well. And, as if such a weekend needed any jam on it, on Sunday we took the ungrateful child blackberry-picking.

Ungrateful? That’s unfair, since the concept of gratitude simply doesn’t compute at five. Let’s say instead that he suffers from Infant Selective Memory Syndrome.

“And what did you say,” I enquired smugly, “when they asked what you did at the weekend?” But any hopes I had of being awarded end-of-term prize for inspirational parenting were dashed by his answer.

“I told them I watched Cardcaptors on television,” he said. And I understood more then about the cyclical nature of history than I ever learned at that grammar school.

It cuts both ways, of course.

“What did you do at school today?” is a frequently asked question in our house. There must, after all, be some reason why he’s so tired by half past three. But information is sparse and unreliable.

After a day which I know had included a full dress rehearsal for the end-of-term show, I asked Alex what he had done, only to be told that he had “watched a video”. Sometimes I feel this education lark would function more efficiently without the kids.