An introduction

See that sow, with the swollen mammaries and enormous litter of piglets? That's what I want to be. A mum.

I always have wanted that,one day, in some distant future. But having found the man I was destined to spend the rest of my life with at the tender age of 19, and embarked on no less than nine years of ever so responsible sex, children were going to come 'when we were ready', when I had finally decided that actually, yes, you can meet the man you plan to grow old with when you are still unsure what hair colour, cut of jeans or pizza topping you prefer, and once we had taken the tiny step of getting married.

I imposed a few limits on myself - I didn't want to be married until I was at least 25 and I didn't want to start a family until we had been married at least a year.

After a few months of marriage made the arrangement seem comfortable, permanent and right, I realised that I had done enough waiting. I hatched a plan and proposed it to my husband. I was not prepared to say goodbye to fun just yet. I would have one last sun-drenched, carefree, irresponsibly drunken Glastonbury, then, for our first anniversary we would go to Cambodia and spend two weeks doing the kind of backpacking the advent of children forbids.

Then, I would go off the pill and we would go from practising the art of babymaking enthusiastically but with no hope of success, as we had been doing for the best part of a decade, and get down to business the way my Catholic priest likes to think we had been doing it all along.

And that pretty much takes us to today...