Most parenting fails are flagged a long way in advance, and you can see them careering towards you in slow motion. “Ah, forgot to inculcate a sport ethic,” you think. “That’ll bite me in 10 years.” And sure enough it does, when you have a kid who ducks if someone throws a ball at her, no matter how much warning she has had that this is part of an established game.
Then there are the failures that land on your head like an anvil in a cartoon. “What was actually wrong with Margaret Thatcher?” the 14-year-old came home from school asking. “She seems OK. Popular. Modernising.”
