I love my wife, but I’d never voluntarily pull a bogie out of her nostril. (I say ‘voluntarily’ as if there’s the chance that one day I might be forced to do so under duress, which is possible, I suppose.)

Why am I telling you this? Because I also love my two month-old daughter, but if I see so much as a hint of a bogie up her nose I jump at the chance to dig it out, to the point where I make it a personal mission. Forget those things that suck snot up: it’s all about the tissue, about how you fold it and scoop the slimy goo out, coaxing it from its dark abode until it slugs over her upper lip and into the glare of daylight.

It’s like Operation. Remember Operation?

This is Operation.

The only difference between plucking a plastic bone from a board game and a glutinous bogie from my daughter’s nostril is that I don’t use tweezers. (And she’s not a board game, and so on, and so on.) But I get the same sense of satisfaction from extracting a bogie from a dark nostril, Chilean miner-style, as I did way back when I tried to remove the wishbone from my cartoon patient as a child, hand trembling, waiting for the buzzer.

And then, once you’ve removed said bogie (or ‘booger’, if you’re from across the pond), you hold it up for all to see and comment on its size, declaring ‘Look at the size of that!’ whilst triumphantly holding the tissue aloft, pea-sized bogie glistening in the sunlight. Nobody wants to see it, but you don’t care. Instead, you seamlessly lob the tissue into the nearest bin and admire the fact that your child can now breathe through newly-opened airways.