This morning I took out a new loaf from the bread bin, cut off the end piece and stood motionless for five minutes staring at it.

I love the end piece. I want to eat the end piece, but some ancient, primitive part of my brain prevents me.

This is the part controlled by my mother. Years of early training has ingrained in me the need to keep the end piece and use it, jammed up against the ‘open’ end of the bread as an extra prophylactic against the dehydrating effects of air and the 24-hour wait until it is next needed for breakfast. These embedded instructions still, after nearly 30 years, override a) conscious thought and b) my personal preferences. My mother never snacked to this day. The idea of a comforting piece of toast – midmorning, say, or with a cup of coffee at 3pm if lunch didn’t quite hit the spot – baffles and unnerves her.

As I stare down at my granary dilemma, I recall a survey recently carried out by Hallmark – no doubt rigorously by the crack team of sociologists and qualitative research teams they have on hand at all times – which revealed that 32 is the age at which women turn into their mothers. This disturbs me more than a little.

At a conservative estimate, I was 25 before I even started to develop a personality of my own. Until then, I was just a jumble of maternal rules and regulations, coupled with a profound readiness to bow to any form of adult authority. Basically, at any time until the end of the Nineties, any middle-aged woman could have come up to me in the street, told me to set myself on fire and I would have doused myself with petrol from the nearest car and asked her for a match.

Even those who, unlike me, did the sensible thing and went through a period of teenage rebellion, come to find from their late 20s onwards that after all their passionate, hormonefuelled efforts, adolescent mutiny only ever ran skin-deep. Revolt against curfews, sartorial restrictions (altogether now – “That’s not a skirt, it’s a belt!”) and the general Total Unfairness of Life all you want – there is still a moment in your existence when you will find yourself forbidding people to sit on a sofa before you feel you have quite got the value out of the pristine states to which you have recently brought them.

"If only I had my Mother's competence"