Sometimes, I get muddled up and call Domino, our dog, Hugo. When I am in Australia, I often call Hugo, “Shaun”, my brother, and vice versa. But I never get Anna mixed up with any other person.

I have no doubt that Domino, subconsciously, has become a baby sustitute. On walks, I sometimes beckon to him, “Come on, baby.” When he is being cute, I say to him, “Good boy, darling,” just like I used to say it to Hugo.

I miss having small children, on one level, with their uncritical devotion. Often when I walked along the street with Hugo when he was a boy, even up to the age of twelve, he would instinctively slip his hand into mine.

When Hugo went to boarding school, Harrow School, just before his fourteenth birthday, the apron tie was ripped off. I did not like it. I think of his time at Harrow, both positively and negatively. The negative, is that I lost day to day contact. I know, stereo-typically, teenagers retreat to their bedrooms at some point, never to be seen again. But, I did not witness this steady transition from dependent to independent. It was artificially forced on us by boarding school.

We went to see Hugo every Sunday for lunch or tea for the five years he was at Harrow. When he left school, he asked me, “Mum, why did you and Dad come up every weekend?” I answered, “We thought you needed to see us.” Without any accusation in his voice, he told me that he often had to cut short things he was doing to meet us. The truth is, we needed to see him. Many of the boys only saw their parents after several weeks. At eighteen that is okay. At thirteen, it would have been agony for me.

We did the same thing every time we visited. We took him to Old Etonian (ironically as Eton is the rival school) for pizza or Cafe Cafe for a burger. We stayed for about 45-60 minutes. Time never ran over. Conversation was sometimes stilted. Geoff and Hugo talked about football a lot. I had to listen, pretending to be interested. I usually zoned out and observed other parents with their boys. To my mind, it seemed that pheasant and stag parents had a more formal relationship with their boys. I was more needy. I wanted to ‘soul search’ Hugo: touch him and stroke him. Look for signs that he was unhealthily unhappy. Sometimes he was stressed: with work; sometimes he was tired and grumpy. He was never utterly miserable to my knowledge.

In the early years, I would bake cakes for him, and take up “tuck”, food like fruit and crisps. Filler food. I despaired at the state of his room, but over time, he became tidier. Eventually, he banned me from coming to his room. Fair enough, it was his space. If somehow, I managed to get into it, he said in a non-aggressive way, “Mum, don’t touch anything. I know where everything is.”

At the beginning of Harrow, they take a photo of the new boys in the tails that they wear on Sundays for church and lunch, and formal occasions. They have their boater-straw hat – in front of them. I only saw a handful of boys wear their hats around the Hill; the school is on the top of a hill, called Harrow on the Hill. And they take one towards the end of their school life.

Hugo told me that he was late for his new boy photo and had to run as fast as he could. I think you can see that dynamism in the photo.

The school is spread out all over the Hill. And Hugo lost weight with all the walking and running. At first, he would forget to take the right thing to class. And he would have to run back to The Park, his house, and leg it back again to class. In the first term he looked shattered, white as a sheet, and I fretted and worried. I imagine that if you took an aerial film of the boys between lessons, it would look like ants swarming over an ant hill.

But he survived. I just about didn’t. I missed him more than words can express. I miss him after seeing him on Monday at Uni.

So I am going to take my baby, Domino, out for a walk in a minute. And then he shall curl up beside me and rest his head on my lap. I can see the attraction of dogs; they don’t grow up and leave home.