An old movie of me is on the school curriculum! Sad to say, I am shocked by my very own arguments | Zoe Williams

“You have been in our PBE movie,” my youngest reported, when she obtained dwelling from university. I obtain it hard to disaggregate the acronym classes in the timetable, and tend to assume almost everything is PE. It struck me as not likely, even so, that I’d be in a PE movie, so I dredged my mind and uncovered “philosophy, beliefs and ethics”. Absolutely sure, that checks out. I have beliefs, a few of ethics. I have to have mentioned them in a movie at some point or other.

“I explained you have been my mum, and no person thought me,” she continued, and I explained: “Why? Are you regarded for making up strange lies?” And she reported: “That also, but also, different surnames. Then, when the instructor thought me, she requested if you’d appear in and talk to the course, and I mentioned you’d almost certainly like that but, from my point of perspective, unquestionably no way.”

“What was I indicating?” I requested, dragging her focus back again to the movie. She gave me an indulgent search. “I wasn’t listening.” And after that I considered no additional about it.

But that was not the conclude of it. I commenced having clips from pals whose little ones are also in yr 9. There’s my huge encounter, circa 2010 (I guess), conversing about Major Ethics – the loss of life penalty, abortion, voluntary euthanasia – as the voice of humanism. It is not a official doctrine, see any of us can be its superior priestess. The problem is, what I’m indicating is wild. I was then, as now, versus money punishment, for reproductive self-willpower, professional the ideal to die. So I don’t disagree with myself, but all my arguments begin in a unusual spot: “The dying penalty is completely wrong due to the fact all acts of violence have their roots in the early-life brutalisation of the perpetrator.” I indicate: possibly? But not automatically, and that is not why it’s erroneous. “Abortion is appropriate mainly because a foetus isn’t a child – only a child is a baby”: sure, but it is a bit of a “Jackanory” way to set it.

Did my good friends clip me in a peculiar way? Did the BBC? Was it just one of these times when I do not make feeling? Disgrace that this must be the working day that can make it on to the college curriculum, at particularly the point my individual offspring reaches it. But, on the shiny aspect, she was not listening.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist