“How’s your mum this morning?” my friend enquired during the school run after a particularly good girls night out. “She’s fine but she’s not allowed to eat cocktails anymore,” came back the stoic reply from my six year-old.

How God managed to invent both cocktails and children in the same lifetime is beyond me. If he wants us to enjoy ourselves occasionally, why make us pay for it?

Another pal was recently greeted, when picking up her son from a music lesson, with the words: “We were talking about illness and I told them cocktails were the only things that made you sick.”

Maybe it’s just a modern day morality tale, an updated version of Adam and Eve and the whole temptation thing.

Because while hangovers and motherhood don’t mix, you’ve got to indulge sometimes, even though you know it’s not big or clever and you’ll pay for it the next day.

Teenagers are even more incredulous, finding it amazing that we still have the capacity to go out and have a good time, as if fun is off limits and only restricted to the young. “Did you get drunk?” they always ask me piously as I guzzle Berocca the next morning and pretend to carry on as normal while suffering the hammering inside my head and fightint the urge to run away.

Yes, the Absolutely Fabulous Saffy generation is upon us, and we seem to be leading the way in being badly behaved and not the other way around. Why, I have no idea. Perhaps we’ve scared all our children to death, or health education at schools is better. Perhaps they don’t need to drink their own body weight to have a good time. Or perhaps we are the last generation of parents who see the occasional hair-letting down session as an absolute necessity.

But we’ve got nothing on the previous generations, who delighted in drinking martinis before lunch, pure spirits being the only way to get through the day. They’d be horrified at our abstemious natures because at this rate we’ll be a race of teetotallers, making polite conversation with a Perrier in hand. This prospect alone leaves me gagging for a gin and tonic.

I don’t know about you but my childhood was spent in pub car parks with a can of Coke and a packet of Frazzles, waiting until the parents were done.

Considering ourselves much more liberated, our local mums amass on Saturday afternoons in the pub, on the premise of feeding the kids supper, while we stand and chat at the bar.

So I asked my sisters-in-arms for their solutions to the age-old hangover/ motherhood dilemma, and a one word unanimous answer came flying back.

CBeebies. I am not alone. Now that’s what I call sisterhood.