AS A parent, you get quite used to suffering indignities, quite frequently in public.

After the dramatic early days, you move to the moments where your toddler wrecks/screams/cries publicly and you’re powerless to stop the whirlwind.

And then they start talking and repeat a naughty word they once heard you utter whilst behind the wheel, or ask a stranger an embarrassing question.

I thought I was pretty hardened to all of this, but it turns out that my daughter still has the ability to surprise me.

She must have sensed that it was time to put me back in my place, so she came up with a new scheme designed to humiliate and embarrass her poor old mother.

After I pick her up from nursery, she then doesn’t want to let me out of her sight when we get home, so I am followed everywhere.

I often find that I am trying to wash dishes, prepare the evening meal or make the next day’s packed lunches with a child literally sitting on my feet.

Aside from my panic that it is dangerous, it is also infuriating having to deal with such a sit-on protest, having your every step haunted by a mini zombie following you and dementedly chanting ‘mummy, mummy, mummy’.

No matter what else I suggest that she does or set up at the kitchen table for her to play with, it’s no use.

The harassment has reached the aforementioned new levels because she now grabs for my clothes in a way she hadn’t previously thought to do.

If I am crouching down to speak to her on her level, she’ll often make a move straight for my top, yanking it down sharply at the neck, which, of course, immediately exposes my underwear.

This has happened while we’ve been out in public, and usually occurs too quickly for me to be able to immediately prevent it – cue a very red-faced moment in the supermarket or shop.

The other day, she manoeuvred herself around my lower torso as I stood at the sink. Extending her arms and standing on my toes to gain my full attention, she then grabbed my underwear and shorts and pulled on them so hard that within seconds they were both around my ankles.

Thank goodness that our kitchen window faces out on to our (non-overlooked) garden.

I think the sight of my posterior and my reaction made her laugh, but I was keen not to make this incident so much fun that she’d think about repeating it.

Motherhood, eh?