Net Working Time, 40 Minutes. Net Upset Time, All Afternoon.

Session one, a Higher reading paper, is recorded in her Diary of an EAL Mum on the EMTAS blog: “Net working time: 40 minutes. Net upset time: the whole afternoon.” Told she had done really well, her daughter replied: “Mum, I am a native speaker, I told you it would be easy”.

Session two made it into Eva’s diary and nowhere else. Its rivals included friends, a book, crosswords, a great deal of hair-washing and, at one low point, homework.

I know this kitchen. I taught the piano for nine years. Thirty-one other people’s children reached Grade 5 at my kitchen table. My own three reached the kitchen table. The eldest managed the first eight bars of “Für Elise”, announced that he could play the piano, he just didn’t want to, and has kept his word.

Eva’s record of outmanoeuvred expertise goes back. In a 2018 instalment, when her daughter had just arrived in Year 1, the bedtime deal was Italian pages read by Eva in exchange for English pages read by the child. Eva once read ten Italian books in a row to get one tiny English book read, a single line to a page. That is not a negotiation. That is a ransom. By the GCSE options in 2023 she was describing the family method as “to stress unnecessarily”, and asking every day whether the options had been confirmed.

What finally moved the Italian was not Mum. A month before the speaking test, her daughter listened to a recording of her own practice and found she sounded less fluent and confident than she had assumed. She made time for practice herself. Eva put the moral in capital letters, which saves me the trouble: teenagers do not want to learn with their parents. Her husband has taught maths at college and university. Their daughter will not be helped by Dad. They pay a maths tutor.

Our daughter asked last month whether she could learn the piano properly. Properly turned out to mean the woman on the next road, £34 for half an hour. I drive her there on Tuesdays and wait outside in the car. She is coming on beautifully. I can hear it through the window.