Still, if you've seen the pictures of Fergie, Eugenie and Beatrice holding hands and strutting down the street on a night out, you must have wanted the ground to swallow them up.

I'm all for mother-daughter bonding.

You can't beat a shopping spree at the VQ together and there's no-one better to scream along with at a Take That gig or shed a tear with over film classics like Now Voyager.

But I don't want to down tequilas and dance til dawn with my mum.

If you do, all I've got to say to both guilty parties is, haven't you got any friends your own age?

It smacks of desperation.

I adore my mum and she looks better than most women half her age but I don't want to see her shaking her booty to Beyonce: I don't want her to hear my guttermouth after a few glasses of wine: I don't want to have to hold her hair out of her face while she pukes, and I certainly don't want to talk about sex with her.

It might sound cool when you're 13, having a mum who's more like a best friend but if that's the case, who's going to be your mum?

At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, parents should be parents.

Children need parental boundaries – it can't be a coincidence bad gals like Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears have been papped out and about looking worse for wear with their mums in tow.

They're the kind of mother who shared her cigs with their daughter when she was 15 and let her smoke in the house, claiming it was because at least then she knew where she was and what she was doing.

In reality she just didn't dare say anything that would make her unpopular.

My dad has always lived by the mantra "you're not supposed to be friends with your kids".

And while it sounds a bit Victorian, I now understand what he meant.

A decent parent has to impose rules, the children might not like it but it's for their own good.

The only truly acceptable times these kind of boundaries can be blurred are family occasions like weddings and funerals.

I'm not against party-loving parents – I hope I'm still having as much fun as my dad when I'm 60 – but inter-generational nightclubbing just isn't normal.

And if you're the Queen's grand-daughters, so you get invites to impossibly VVIP-only parties like P-Diddy's, wouldn't it take the sheen off the bling when instead of a hot Argentinian polo player or a designer bag dangling from your arm, you've got a 40-something woman whose neckline's too low and skirt is too short?

Fergie allegedly said she and her girls love going out "on the pull".

I rest my case.

The fact she's adopting language used by teenagers to describe her own activities is horrendously embarrassing in itself – before you even envisage the scene.

Clearly her daughters are devoted to her or presumably they wouldn't be seen dead in London's hippest nightspots with their mum tagging along.

But I have a word of warning to the princesses and any other dutiful daughters taking pity on their mums in a similar way.