Jake comes and sits down. He takes my hand and turns it over, examining it as if he’s never seen it before. ‘And what if I don’t want to get through it? What if I’ve suddenly woken up to the fact that there’s more to life than getting through it?’

I open my mouth to answer with some platitude about how life can’t always be a bed of roses, but he rushes on before I can speak. ‘What if I don’t want a baby? What if I don’t want to spend any more time alone in cold cubicles with crumpled wank mags?’

My eyes widen. I thought that was the bit he liked best. Sometimes he specifically chose his own porny material to take with him.

‘What if I don’t want our sex life littered with charts and thermometers and injections?’

‘I…’

‘When did we last go wild and have a purely recreational shag?’

‘I…’

‘When?’ he says with the triumphant note of the just in his voice.

‘What are you saying? I don’t mark notches on the headboard, like some old Lothario.’ I do, however, mark notches on my heart after every failed coupling. Failed in the sense that it didn’t produce a pink, bouncing baby at the end of it. ‘I thought you enjoyed our sex life.’

‘Then you are truly delusional,’ Jake says.

I’m stunned. I had hoped that in the face of another disappointment, another thwarted dream, he’d take me in his arms, shush my tears—even though that isn’t politically correct these days—and tell me that it would all be fine, we would find another wad of our hard-earned cash to blow on hormones for Jake to inject into my bum, and that next time Sammy Sperm would get it together with Esme Egg and we would no longer be the complete failures we are with our inability to succeed in the most basic of human tasks.

How difficult can it be to make a baby? These days our teenagers are popping them out all the time. Britain has the highest rate of child mothers in Europe. Aren’t a mobile phone and a baby at the top of the ‘must have’ list for every schoolgirl? Go anywhere near Miss Sixty in any high street, on any Saturday and it’s like a teen mums’ convention. Okay, so I’m a little past the acne stage, but at thirty-four it does seem a bit unfair that all my eggs, like the ones in Jake’s unattended saucepan, appear to be turning hard-boiled.

‘I need space,’ Jake says into my self-pity.

‘You’re not an astronaut,’ I say. ‘You don’t need space.’