One sunny morning last year I took my two children, Hope and Isaac, to a playgroup at our local park in south-east London. Isaac was asleep in his pram and I reckoned I had at least eight minutes of uninterrupted me time to scroll through my phone.
After two of my eight luxurious minutes, Hope reappeared, transformed into some kind of Dalmatian mongrel. ‘I’m a puppy,’ she announced, pawing at my leg. But already I had a sense of foreboding. To extract a three-year-old from a dog costume was going to be torture – for both of us.
Sure enough, when everyone began singing the hideous ‘tidy-up time’ chant, Hope was still 100% dog. ‘Five more minutes,’ I said, ‘and then it’s time to take it off.’ A bark signalled a hard no. I switched to reasoning with her. ‘Your
