I’m one of those yo-yo sons who keep going back to Mum and Dad

Parents, heed the warning signs that your son is about to move back home: “spontaneous” Sunday visits to case the joint; lingering looks at the fully stocked fridge, and wistful remarks about how sweet we used to look in school uniform all increase. For good measure, I’ll usually start sending baby photos to my aged parents via text. It gets them every time.

In the past three years I have moved home three times, a combination of being unable to pay the rent and being caught between living arrangements as my peripatetic friends come and go. I’m not alone. The Office for National Statistics has recorded the largest-ever number of young men still living at home with their parents, with a third of males aged 20 to 34 still roosting in the family nest.

We enjoy home comforts a little too much. Dirty clothes put in a basket are magically returned clean and ironed, bins are emptied, beds are made. We’re less a boomerang generation, more like oversized poultry — only with more mess. While the prodigal son of yesteryear returned home just once with his tail between his legs, today’s comes back like a yo-yo. The nice thing about a boomerang is that at least you can throw it some distance.

Every time I come back there are new challenges. I am the eldest of three boys, to which the default response is: “Your poor mother.” My youngest brother is at university in Manchester but the middle one is a drama student in London and shares the family pile. There are no pistols at dawn but a lot of topless chest-puffing in the bathroom at 7am — and woe betide the man who has eaten the last pizza in the freezer.

Some say this points to a bumpy future. Division of household labour is statistically worse if men move straight from the parental abode to the marital home. In Italy, where this is common, many men never learn basic housework skills and expect their wives to take over where their mothers left off. Currently, cohabiting men in Britain do an estimated 10 hours a week less housework than their partners.

I’m far more fastidious about reducing my domestic footprint after my forays into the real world. Mum might argue but there’s a significant upturn in my badly cooked home meals and poorly washed pans.

Significantly, though, my parents seem to put up with me. My father likes to quote from Robert Frost’s Death of the Hired Man: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.”

Moreover, unlike my previous returns to the family stable, I am no longer a single man about town, and so this is not the only roof I have for my head. To which the only logical response is: “Your poor girlfriend.”