I study my husband’s face: dashing Doctor Flint, with those intensely blue eyes and long, long lashes, as lush and curly as if he’s been at my mascara. I suspect the majority of his colleagues and patients nurture a crush on him. I’m hoping to detect a glimmer of humour – or at least sympathy for my plummeting oestrogen levels on this drab, grey-skied morning. He just regards me coolly as if I’ve been sweating disgustingly just to spite him. Considering his lofty position in the medical profession, his bedside manner stinks.

Trying to shrug off my irritation, I shower after Andy and peep into our daughter’s room where she is still in bed. She has fine, light brown hair, big blue eyes like her dad’s and a wide gappy smile, with two milk teeth gone.

‘Morning, Iz,’ I say. ‘Time to get up, love. Remember we said we’d go swimming today?’

‘Oh, I forgot!’

‘Let’s go before it gets too busy,’ I add. She slips out of bed and grabs at clothes from her wardrobe; Izzy won’t tolerate being told what to wear. People are often taken aback that Andy and I have a seven-year-old daughter. We are both fifty-two and I am easily the oldest mother at the school gate. When Izzy was conceived we had long given up hope of ever having a second child; there were a couple of miscarriages after we’d had our son, and then nothing more after that. We both had tests, and everything seemed to be in proper working order, but the years rolled by with no more pregnancies.

Andy and I had just accepted that we would only have the one child. Spencer was a brilliant boy, and we didn’t feel short-changed in any way. In fact, although we never used contraception, we’d almost forgotten it might be possible for us to conceive again. We certainly didn’t expect it to happen when I was forty-four.

When I missed a period I thought it was the menopause starting. But instead, along came Izzy, an explosion of joy for whom I am grateful every single day. Spencer, who’s twenty-two, looked a little queasy when we announced that he’d soon have a sibling (although he came round, of course, and he has adored Izzy from the moment she was born). But I guess most teenage boys don’t wish to be confronted by the hard evidence that their parents still do it.

We don’t much anymore, which wouldn’t be so much of an issue, were it not for a more startling aspect of the menopause. More startling, anyway, than the sweating, which I’d expected. But I hadn’t anticipated this surge in libido, to the point where I want it constantly and am driven to pawing at Andy in bed like a rampant sex pest.

Aw, Viv, I’m a bit knackered tonight.