Alain de Botton, you are a bad man. Coming in here with all your philosophy and wisdom, upsetting innocent people like myself who are just standing about with their fingers in their ears going “la-la-la” and pretending it’s not happening: “To a parent of small children,” he tweets, “(it is) astonishing they might as adults move abroad so one would see them only once a year - and survive”.

Indeed, as a mother of a two-year-old and a three-year-old, it does astonish me. In fact, I will go so far as saying it is patently not true: they may well go abroad (after all, I did) but I will not survive. Not if today is anything to go by...

Walking out of the gym’s on-site creche, I turn around to berate the younger one for doing something infantile, and when I turn back Curly Girlie is gone. Vanished. Like she was never there.

Behind me, a long, empty corridor runs back to the gym. She’s been bugging me to see where I go to “do running” - has she snuck back there?

To the left, stairs descend to the toilets and other mysterious basement rooms. She needed a wee - has she come over all independent and trotted off down there?

Outside the glass sliding doors - which parent-hating numbskull designed the building with a set of sliding doors right next to the creche, I ask you? - lurks: (on one side) a swimming pool filled with green winter water, (on the other side) an industrial estate, (straight ahead and up a bit) a railway line, and (straight ahead and down a bit) a dingy underpass leading to the car park.

My heart rate hits a level I could only dream of on the cross-trainer: a railway line; an unattended swimming pool; and, my mind helpfully chips in, gangs of mad child thieves.