Now, Cas has, I know, seen on the internet hardcore stuff, things I never even knew were physically possible. And I have it on authority from Rose that all the children have watched something totally unmentionable on YouTube before it was removed. ‘It wasn’t anything like… fisting, or something, was it?’ I said to Rose. ‘Oh I should think it was,’ she answered, glumly. ‘Nothing seems to bother them.’

But it does. They can’t take the penguins at all. They just can’t hack it.

‘Turn it off, Mum,’ Cas begged, when we first watched it. ‘It’s just… too… upsetting.’

We sit there in a row, crying.

In my head, while I lie sleepless in bed next to a slumbering Ralph later, I consider all the minuses and the pluses of the road ahead.

On the minus side I can come up with a list as long as my arm: if I stand up to him and refuse to ‘deal with it’, Ralph will be utterly furious and make my life miserable for next nine months, in fact, make that for ever, and the children will be repulsed at the evidence that we have had sex even once since Posy was conceived.

I’ll be a scraggy, spent-looking, haggard older mother with a pram-face, people will doubtless enquire if I am the baby’s ‘nan’ at the pannier market, we will be straight back to nappies and sandpit and fingerpainting hell, I will have to stand glumly pushing a baby in a swing all weekend while three older children want to go to raves and take E. I’ll be compared to Sophie Wessex (and not in a good way).

We’ll never be able to go away again, we will be continuously exhausted from lack of sleep, we’ll have to buy a Renault Espace, probably a cheap one on eBay, in fact, we will have to buy all that KIT, all over again, we would have a huge, two-week-long fight about what to call the baby (I love romantic, folksy English names like Tansy and Violet, Ralph likes Mitfordesque names like Pamela and Daphne); as for the child itself, we would be pushing sixty before it was at university and Ralph would never be able to retire if he were to keep the child in the plush, velvet-lined style to which all children these days are accustomed… and then, what if there was something WRONG with the child?