You could call it drive-by nostalgia. Whenever I visit my relatives in west London, I take a tiny detour past the three-bedroom suburban semi that I grew up in. In today’s world of speed-laced instability, nostalgia usually refers to times of greater normality. But if there’s one thing that house taught me, it’s that there’s no such thing as normality – especially when it comes to households.

Within those walls, between the early 1980s and late 1990s, I experienced life in a two-parent nuclear family, a single-parent family, a so-called ‘reconstituted’ two-parent family with a stepfather, a reconstituted single-parent family, a no-parent family, then some kind of surrogate-parent family, before my younger brother and I moved as far away as possible to reconstitute our no-parent family somewhere else. If the Greeks were writing about the Oedipus complex today, they’d need a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

My drive-by twinge of nostalgia is always for both the first and second phases of single-parent family life. The image the house front conjures up is of Friday evenings in the living room with my brother and our late mother. My brother and I would take a break from homework on Fridays and mum would take a break from cooking. We’d have those breadcrumb-coated, oven-ready fish fillets for dinner, invariably chased down with apple strudel and vanilla ice cream which mum would have bought on the way back from work. The sole breadwinner in our house since I was seven, she was a full-time radiographer at a nearby hospital as well as full-time mother. She also developed a part-time sideline as a flower arranger. The media enjoys portraying single mothers as welfare scroungers, but I’ve never known anyone to work harder.

When she wasn’t working or being a mother or both, she would refashion herself as our own private tutor, partly in response to the sanctimony and scorn coming from closer to home than the media. Relatives and friends – particularly from our part of the Asian community – would typically express their disapproval of her divorce with the delicate phrase: ‘It must be hard on the children’. And for ‘hard’ read ‘harmful’. So mum sought to prove wrong all those tacit accusations that she’d failed as a mother by bringing home maths and English textbooks from the library and WH Smiths. We duly adopted something of her work ethic – which is why Friday nights were the only weekday evenings we didn’t engage in some form of schoolwork or bookwormery in our bedrooms.