I flew home to tell my daughter off for wasting the money I’d been sending for five years. I found her at school eating half a bread roll — and then the counsellor told me she’d been registered as a low-income student since the year I left.

She said: were you angry with me? When you got off the plane.

And I said yes.

She looked up. I think she had expected me to say something else.

I said: I got on that plane to tell you off. I had it all worked out. I had a whole speech about the laptop money.

And my daughter said: I know. Grandma told me you were coming.

I had not told anybody I was coming. I had booked that flight at eleven at night and told nobody.

She knew. My mother rang her that same night and told her that her father was flying in because he had had enough of her.

So my daughter went into school the next morning knowing that her father was on his way to be angry with her — and she went in anyway, and sat on a planter, and ate half a roll, and waited.