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It’s tough being a kid, when you’re likely to be relentlessly bullied by your peers for having the wrong logo on your bag.

This is the age, apparently, when everything must be branded. If it’s not, it must immediately be discarded.

Last night’s battle was over a flimsy sports bag with bad reviews not large enough to accommodate books, folders or sports kit, liable to last about a week.

To his credit, the boy did eventually concede that despite it sporting the logo of a very fashionable brand, it wasn’t in the least practical and agreed his birthday money could be spent more wisely.

What’s wrong with last year’s perfectly functional bag with a little white swoosh on the top, you may ask. Nothing whatsoever, except that image is everything by this juncture in their lives.

This the modern tribalism in which loyalty to a particular football team, tech manufacturer, make of car and sportswear brand defines your whole identity.

There’s no place for dad’s functional utilitarianism, making do with whatever fits the bill, no matter how generic. If he has made it to a debt-free existence by frugal living, that’s only because he’s a fool.

Hence noses were turned up at all the shoes on display in a shop in Turkey last week. Friends would make fun of them, they protested. So yesterday we bought identical shoes locally, for seven times the price, which we can expect to be scuffed and battered by half-term thanks to lunchtime football matches.

Alas peer influence is so strong at this stage in life that anything uncool is about to be discarded. That includes studying, focussing, paying attention. It also includes aspiration, so talk of university or apprenticeships is out of the question.

All we know is that the meaning of life is the accumulation of branded stuff. Even energy drinks must be branded now. No doubt their sandwich fillings will be unfashionable next month. Crisps will need to be a particular shape.

On and on it goes. Image is everything now, and for ever more. It will never stop, for the brands are masters of human psychology. They know what makes us tick better than we know our own selves.