I am banned from the school playground. Not, you understand, because I’m some sort of cross between the Child-Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Cruella De Vil from that film with all the dogs and the Candyman off that movie, erm, Candyman, but because my children are now officially too old to be escorted beyond the school gates.

Or so they say. I am instructed to stop in the street while they run in to find their friends, and I find myself standing there like Flying Officer Archibald Ives on The Great Escape, driven over the edge after the Germans discover one of the tunnels and flinging himself at the barbed wire fence, to die under a hail of Nazi bullets.

That doesn’t happen, of course. There is no hail of bullets. A swarm of children running past me and the occasional dog wrapping its lead around my leg, and the disappearing forms of my children as they go off to do whatever they do in the playground before school, which shall now remain a mystery to me and the other parents who have been told in no uncertain terms that our presence is no longer required in the schoolyard before the bell sounds.

I feel somewhat saddened at this shift in the dynamic, at this not-so-subtle signal that the children don’t need me as much as they used to.

For about five minutes.

Then I think about all the things I can do with my new-found time, that tiny little window of opportunity between dropping the kids off, walking home, getting my head into the work frame of mind and leaving the house to come to T&A Towers. Theoretically, I can now expand that by a whole ten minutes. So here are some of the things I can do... along with the actual likelihood of them happening represented by a score out of five.

l I could do some exercise. I could, if I drop the children off early enough, have about 20 minutes of exercise. I could do a session of the wife’s Jillian Michaels’ exercise video, which shreds your muscles until you scream like a baby. Likelihood: 0/5 l I could do some cleaning. In point of fact, I did actually run a rag around the rim of the toilet and squirt some bleach in it this week, but only because I was taken to task for never doing anything like that. Likelihood: 1/5 (rising to 4/5 depending on domestic pressure) l I could do 20 minutes’ worth of writing on the novel that is going to make me rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Likelihood: 4/5 (It’s fun).

l I could watch Heir Hunters for a bit, have a coffee, and spray some Pledge around so the house smells as though it’s been cleaned, though it really hasn’t. Likelihood: 5/5. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.