Last Sunday was Mother’s Day.

If that is news to you, I suggest a hasty trip to the florist might be in order. Or you might get away with giving your mum a card this Sunday and then acting surprised when she tells you it was actually last week.

The rest of you, along with me, probably found yourselves, at some point last week, staring at a simultaneously overwhelming and underwhelming collection of Mother’s Day cards. Overwhelming because of the sheer volume of choice. Underwhelming because of the hilarious lack of quality.

I mean, seriously, is any mother genuinely moved to receive a saccharine sweet card complete with pictures of flowers or teddy bears? And to find inside, not a heart-felt message from their son or daughter, but instead meaningless platitudes written by a failed author called Steve who works at Carte Blanche Greetings ltd, wondering where his career went wrong.

The worst offenders have a blackboard-scratchingly terrible poem inside. You know the ones:

M is for your Mother’s heart
U is for your uterus, where I lived as a warm, happy foetus for 9 months
M is for your Mother’s heart

And, of course, you have the obligatory reams of ‘World’s Best Mum’ cards. And you don’t need me to tell you how preposterous an offence this is to logic.

Besides, does nothing have any value apart from being better than something else? Cannot my Mum be a fantastic mum in and of herself without being favourably compared to the rest of the worldwide mothering community? Quite frankly, the relative mothering prowess of anyone besides my own mother could not concern me less.

Ok, I’m playing Devil’s Advocate there. It’s mostly a harmless, kind of cute way of appreciating your mum. If completely illogical.

In amongst the dross though, one card caught my eye. It simply read ‘To Britain’s Best Mum.’

Which I found hilarious. Who looks through all of those ‘World’s Best Mum’ cards thinking “she’s good but not quite THAT good” only to find this one and think “actually, she might be the best in Britain, you know. The quality IS generally lower here…”?

I am sorry if you were the recipient of that card – what a backhanded compliment that must have been.

Obviously, I bought it for my own mother. But that doesn’t count. It was very funny. You can ask her.