After my first meeting as chair, a parent commented how well-informed I was and asked the headteacher about my background. “I told him you were in education” she said. As a minder of teachers’ children, I suppose this is true.

Now many of my minded children attend the school, my cover is well and truly blown. Parents who see me every day outside school, pushing a double buggy, towing a two-year-old, festooned with lunchboxes, PE kit and discarded clothing, can all identify their chair of governors as the woman who looks like Mary

Poppins’ granny.

The annual meeting is my opportunity to re-assert my authority. I pop into the nearest phone box and emerge as “super-governor” in a borrowed suit, lipstick, shoes that hurt and carrying a brief case. I then demonstrate that my vocabulary extends beyond “Hold-my-hand-while-we-cross-the-road” and “Put-that-down-you-don’t-know-where-it’s-been”.

Some of the parents probably don’t realise childminder and super-governor are one person. Good.