I think about all the extra stuff my friends must have to worry about now that they’re Mums. The rows and rows of mental filing cabinets stuffed full to the brim with extra information: bottles, school uniform, potties, nappy bags, toy gadgets, shopping lists, dentists, revision, doctors, parents’ evenings, the distant family members of Peppa Pig. The list is endless. I already feel I have too much stuff overloading me, weighing me down, keeping me up at night. When I get home, I pour myself a huge glass of wine and close my eyes to focus on my breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

My mind wanders back to the other day in the office, when I was discussing with Colin how wild pregnancy seems to be, after the announcement that someone in the royal family was pregnant again and the whole Internet erupted with gossip and opinion. I’ve never understood the mania and obsession that surrounds news of another person’s pregnancy.

‘When people are having a baby, I can’t help but think of those little squishy alien toys, you know the ones? Like, having an alien toy inside you, growing and swishing around in your fluids,’ Colin had said.

‘Ha! I know the ones. It is all a bit alien,’ I said.

‘I honestly shudder at the thought. I mean, soz, I know I’m a guy. But still. Imagine casually growing teeth in amongst all your organs.’

‘Yeah. A little ball of hair and teeth and ears, just growing slowly, in there.’ I pointed to my tum.

‘I can’t,’ he said, covering his mouth dramatically.

‘I can’t, either,’ I said.

Thank god for Colin.

I down another huge glass of wine, push the empty wine bottle under the sofa and crawl into bed.

11

2004

Bea and I were going through an Avril Lavigne phase – it was all about pretending to own a skateboard, wearing heavy make-up, dark nail varnish and fingerless gloves for no reason. We would sing her lyrics very seriously from the top of Bea’s bunk bed, staring out at the walls covered in Polaroid pictures. Everything felt intense: every text exchange with a boy, every film ending, every friendship blip. All handwritten notes needed to be saved in a box, every train ticket, all tickets to gigs were stuck on the wall. Everything was a memory, being stored into its own filing cabinet.

We were in the sixth form at school, and one week, a girl in our class called Charlize suddenly dropped out. The deputy head teacher, Mrs Paterson, had broken the news to us in assembly. She seemed nervous when reading off her piece of paper, and she kept moving her glasses up her nose as they kept slipping down. ‘Hi everyone. Charlize is pregnant and has decided she doesn’t need to finish her A levels,’ she said, sternly. We were all quite shocked that it had been publicised in this way, such a formal announcement. I’d have expected the school to keep it all hush-hush. The baby was due in a few months and we were welcome to send gifts or notes to her home address. It was the talk of the classroom for a while. It was widely known that Charlize’s boyfriend, the father of the child, owned a chain of popular hotels in the area and was going to inherit the family business soon, so they would be fine apparently – financially at least. It was weird that the finances were such a talking point.