Right now, as exams for selective secondaries, both state and private, loom on the horizon, parental anxiety regarding their offspring’s promise has reached a zenith. Maths tutors, music teachers and French masters are being lined up across the nation in a sort of stealth operation to give extra shine to the genius that is your child. If dinner party chat is any sort of social barometer, squeezing the most from your child has become an even more gripping topic of middle-class anxiety than the double dip property scare, and that’s saying something. Last week, I found myself discussing Non Verbal Reasoning with a complete stranger in the BBC foyer at White City, at the ungodly hour of 12.40 am. “My son did an hour of test papers every day for a year,” this man told me. “I felt I was letting him down otherwise.” To my shame, I found myself congratulating him. Every day after tea for, well...quite a long time now, I too have trooped upstairs to see the small frame of my son, 10, hunched over past papers for this or that school, in order to fulfil my aim that his cleverness be fulfilled.