Moments before a recent job interview, my phone flashed with a text from my mum. “Good luck,” I imagined it would read, or, this picky eater’s fantasy version, “If they hire you, I will never try to pass off salmon en croute as a vegetarian meal again.”

Instead she’d merely typed the words, “I’m wearing our lipstick”. A bit introspective, you might think. But I could decipher the code – this was a message of heartfelt support.

Allow me to explain: my mum and I sometimes choose to wear the same clothes and make-up. The lipstick in question was our brownish-pink shade of choice, or Bobbi Brown’s semi-matte offering in Nude, to be precise. We both believe that lipstick doubles up as war paint and, before running over my notes for a final time, I had hastily applied mine. Realising that my mum had done exactly the same thing from over 100 miles away was bolstering. Now there were two people – not just skittish, furtively muttering me – fighting my corner.

“How mother-daughter twinning brought me closer to my mum”