How can it be that once more I am in a state of anxiety, wondering how to deal with a thorny issue relating to my children? Today it’s nits. How do you tell your daughter’s best friend’s mother that her daughter has head lice? It’s a tricky one. You don’t want to go bulldozing straight in there; you have to be dead diplomatic. I really don’t give a monkey’s that said best friend has them. It’s just that she’s given them to Flo, and the worst of the worst is that Flo has passed them on to me.

Head lice are nasty, itchy dirty little beggars, with extraordinary powers. They can grow up to twice their original size, change their colour to suit the host head, then lay loads of minuscule eggs which cement themselves to individual hairs, and are virtually impossible to remove. They can also turn a normal (ok, relatively normal) woman into a paranoid head shaker. If you’ve never experienced this phenomenon, a head shaker is not unlike a head banger in action. Someone who cannot pass a basin without feeling compelled to bend over it, whilst feverishly scratching and shaking at the head in order to inspect and count whatever falls out. Believe me it can be very unrelaxing.

Flo’s been feeling the pressure of the stigma too. Flo’s main worry is that someone might ‘see’. She imagines, never having spotted the critters in situ, that her head looks a little like Pigpen’s, the dusty character in Charlie Brown, except it’s not dust that accompanies Flo but a great cloud of insects circling her head at all times. I have promised her that no one can ‘see’, but she insists that she wear loads of clips and hair ties, which does look like she thinks her hair might fly away, were it not tied down in this way.

My other problem is that I can’t go to the hairdresser’s. Imagine the shame of settling down to my free cup of coffee as I wait for Graham to beautify my barnet, only to be told to leave the salon, and never to darken it’s doors again. So I’ve got grey hairs pinging in every direction and straggling locks with shocking split ends. Something has to be done and heaven forbid that the boys catch them. Mind you Max’s hair is so coated with hair gel they’d have a job to penetrate the crust. No, Flo and I can comb and blitz our nits until the cows came home, but this is a pointless activity if the source doesn’t do the same. The time has come to confront the problem head on, so to speak.

I decide that it’s only fair to broach the subject woman to woman at the school gates. I opt for a gentle diplomatic approach, working up to the subject with tact. It goes something like this…

‘Hi there’ I call breezily. ‘Time for a quick chat?’

‘Sorry, I’m in a bit of a rush,’ best friend’s mother replies, talking over the heads of four or five others as she heads for her car. ‘Oh, I’ve been meaning to call you’ she continues, ‘Flo’s got nits and she’s giving them to Katie, have you got some of that stuff to put on?’

I look in horror at the group of parents who are caught up in the middle of this exchange, listening intently. One woman smiles sympathetically at me, I make a mental note to make her my new friend, while the others look at me as if head lice exist on this planet solely because of me. I turn to go home, my head itches like crazy, but I can’t scratch it, well at least not until I’ve turned the corner and I’m out of sight.

Life in the Slow Lane is written by Clare Kent. She has three children - Max is nearly eleven, Flo is nearly eight and Bobby is six and a half - and lives in Wiltshire.