Did you know, says my mum in a tone of voice that really belongs in Tunbridge Wells, that half of parents these days actually bribe their children to get them to read?

I can see this is going to feel wrong to my mum for several reasons. One is that she used to be an infant school teacher, and there are probably hundreds of middle aged electricians and binmen in South Wales who owe their ability to avoid electrocuting customers or mis-filing glass and cardboard to that wicked combination of Janet and John and my mum.

Another is that my mother didn’t so much encourage us to read as kids, as hide the fact from us that the outside world might offer any alternative sort of entertainment whatsoever.

So while I was vaguely aware at nine that other girls in my class collected trolls and listened to someone called The Beatles, or even did something odd with ponies, I spent most of my weekends tucked up in a blanket with a book tucked under my chin.

And not just any old book. By that age I’d devoured the children’s classics and was being guided towards more grownup stuff.

By ten I was perfectly conversant with the quiet turbulences in the breasts and drawing rooms of Jane Austen’s heroines, and by eleven I was toying with the moral dilemmas that gripped Graham Greene.

While other girls lingered in the changing rooms discussing their broken hearts, I was sitting on a bench trying to finish The Heart of the Matter, while simultaneously trying to avoid the odd flying dap. Yes, my mum was keen.

But another reason that my mum won’t understand the bribery game is that she’s a stranger to the diversion that for many 21st century children beats reading books every time. The computer and my mother have never met.

She has read so many stories about deeply religious Nigerian princes offering deals worth millions of quid and then breaking their promises, of Google goggling at your front door, of viruses and Trojan horses and spiders that slip in via something mysterious called wi-fi, that she literally won’t countenance a PC in her house.

So why any youngster who could get lost in Wonderland would instead choose to lose his or her childhood in front of a computer screen is beyond her comprehension. But the fact that parents actually bribe children to turn over a new leaf is almost as bad.

I never bribed you two, she says. I explained why something needed to be done, and then you just did as you were told. That’s probably true.

Up to a point. But I grew up on the edge of town in the 1950s and 60s, when there were enough woods and fields and parks and beaches to play on to keep us occupied from morning until dusk.

Parents in our neighbourhood didn’t bribe their kids then because they didn’t have a clue what they were doing most of the time.

Our neighbour might have considered bribing her eleven-year-old son to stop putting fireworks in milk bottles and throwing them into people’s gardens, if only she’d ever suspected that that was how he spent many a happy afternoon.

I bribed my son unashamedly. It was the only way I could imagine getting us all out in the morning so I could drop him at the childminder before work, and the only way I could imagine getting us a lie-in at the weekend. And actually he did learn to read. Even if he is also a dab hand at computers.

I try to change the subject. Let’s go to the garden centre, I suggest. She doesn’t look impressed.

Why don’t I treat us to a cuppa and some of their walnut cake, I add. She raises her eyebrows and then laughs. All right, she says. You’ve persuaded me.

Because we don’t use the word bribe in our family.