“Now you know the way, don’t you,” I instructed patronisingly, as we discussed our jogging route. “So if you fall behind, you’ll be able to get home,” I continued, like Barbara Woodhouse in lycra, digging myself not so much a hole but a crater with each and every word, as well as all sense of pride into the bargain.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time. We had eaten out late and returned home groaning with pizza, only to wake up and prepare for a fry-up. My suggestion of a run had, strangely, been greeted with great enthusiasm by the collection of teenage boys who’d stayed over, turning the upstairs of our house into a dormitory overnight.

And for some reason I assumed that as I jog round the same route every week and go to the gym now and again, I was invincible, forgetting that the scruffy adolescents accompanying me spend hours running up and down rugby and football pitches every day without even pausing for breath.

To start with it went swimmingly, and I felt like a mother duck with her ducklings fanning out behind her as I ran down the towpath.

How good was this then, I thought smugly? And then it slowly dawned on me as we progressed, that rather than finding it hard to keep up with me, they were actually finding it difficult to run that slowly, and were in fact humouring me...

Motioning them onwards, because I couldn’t speak, gratefully they raced ahead, disappearing around the next bend, scampering past.

And as if my humiliation wasn’t complete, they then waited for me at regular intervals, a Pity Stop if you like, to make sure that I didn’t get left too far behind them.

Running home along the long straight stretch of road near our house, the teens had trounced me so completely I couldn’t even see them and had to limp home to find them chatting on the front doorstep, looking fresh as daisies, compared to the sweating, red heap of a mother who appeared.

I staggered inside, muttering about making them some breakfast when I’d got my breath back sometime next year, and collapsed on the kitchen floor, while they smiled in collective sympathy and decided to go off and play football until I was ready. I, on the other hand, could scarcely get up the stairs let alone race around a pitch.

God knows what they told their mothers.

But instead of the rehearsed conversation that I had in my head about going running with Mrs Mac and how fit I was, I can imagine something more on the lines of ‘poor old Mrs Mac looked like she needed an ambulance’ and “Thank God you’re not like that mum, you still have some dignity and can hold you head up high in public. Her poor children, they must be so embarrassed”.

Back to the drawing board then.