Can't seem to face up to the facts...

Actually that line just came into my head because Miles is sitting behind me playing Psychokiller on the piano.

But there do seem to be a hell of a lot of babies around all of a sudden, and I am finding it quite unsettling.

Not because I want one, because I am still pretty sure that I don't, but because not wanting one is starting to feel even more like a freakish position to hold than it used to.

There is a body clock rush beginning: people are meeting on internet dating services and conceiving within weeks (actually that's only one person, but she neatly illustrates the sharp end of the trend). There's placenta everywhere.

I am trying to work out what it is that is getting to me. I think it's what I assume (perhaps wrongly) to be the volte face of thirtysomething pregnancy... women who have never previously seemed to give a stuff about children suddenly going doe-eyed at the latest bunch of jpegs on the latest 'baby's first website'. (Please, wash the blood off first. Please.)

But it may be that all these women have been nurturing dreams of nurturing for many years, just not talking about it. Or I haven't been listening. In which case, I might have a bit missing. Which is fine: it's a big world, there's plenty to do to make it better, and I have my inner child to look after.

Or it may indeed be that you wake up one morning and feel that your life will count for naught if you don't, as a friend of mine once put it, fulfil your biological imperative. In which case I should start to panic right about now. Especially as I carefully chose a boyfriend with a vasectomy.

joella