When I was eight years old, my friend Nick asked whether I wanted to come to his house for a sleepover. We didn’t call it that back then – that was very much just an American thing at the time – I was asked if I wanted to ‘come and watch a film (Nicholas’s family was one of the first to own a video recorder in my circle) and stay the night’.
So of course the answer was ‘yes’, and after I got back from school on the Friday night, my own mum took me around to Nick’s house in her car, finally letting me go with a ‘behave yourself’ ringing in my ears.