The Reception Teacher Is Coming at 11.10. Hide the Mug.

What follows is the household’s timeline, reconstructed for the inquiry.

Sunday, 7pm. My husband says that a teacher who sees the dining room will “form a view”. He means the paint, which is called Burnt Paprika and which he chose. He asks whether we could get a neutral on by Tuesday.

Sunday, 9pm. The cup question. We own a wedding-present tea set, used twice, and a garden-centre mug that says I’D RATHER BE GARDENING, which is a lie in both directions. The china says: we are people who read to our child. The mug says: we are relaxed about this. We are not relaxed about this.

Monday, 4pm. I clean the inside of the cutlery drawer. I cannot tell you why. Our daughter watches from the stairs and asks whether the teacher is going to live with us.

Monday, 10pm. My husband turns the letter over and finds that we could have had the meeting at school instead. Nobody had read the back.

Meanwhile, the other side. Reception teachers who describe these visits online paint a rather different week. A list of addresses and a slot for each. A teaching assistant, a picture book about the classroom, a camera. Their own petrol, which they pay for themselves. Thirty-odd families, none of whose kitchens they will remember. And one overriding anxiety, which one teacher summed up as finding all the houses in time and stressing about parking. Judging the skirting boards does not make the list. There isn’t room.

Tuesday, 11.12. They arrive. Jeans, cardigan, big smile. The assistant is on the living-room carpet with a basket of toys before I’ve finished saying “Do come in”, and our daughter, who has never shown a stranger anything, begins showing her everything.

Questions asked: What does she like? What doesn’t she like? How would we describe her? (I said “spirited”, then “very good at puzzles”, then, unprompted, listed the puzzles.) Any health needs? And, pen hovering, how exactly do you spell her name? Then a photograph, for her coat peg, so that on the first morning a peg with her face on it would be waiting.

Questions not asked: anything at all about the walls. Tea was served in the china. It was accepted, drunk and not looked at.

Twenty minutes in, our daughter stood up, took the teacher by the hand and announced that she would now show her the bedroom, which has fairies on the wall that Daddy painted. The teacher declined, warmly, with the ease of someone who has turned down thirty bedrooms this week. Our daughter accepted this as one of the mysteries of adulthood and went back to the toys.

We had prepared for an inspection. She had come to photograph a four-year-old for a coat peg. The only person in the house who had wanted anything inspected was the four-year-old.

I watched from the window as they pulled away. They had parked, I noticed, quite badly, with one wheel on next door’s verge. I said nothing. We are not the kind of family that judges.