Choosing to give birth more than once possibly proves failure to live and learn, although Mrs Happy can be forgiven once you've listened to her account of her last delivery, featuring the word rapture far more than is proper when recounting gynaecology, and making home birth sound like Christmas lunch ('the family all there, friends popping in, music playing, everyone smiling, no need to rush anywhere, oh and my cervix opening like a flower').

She envisages a rose-tinted future in which the family will watch her birth videos together in the home cinema and reminisce. She has no conception of the reality of teenagers - their utter refusal to wear Boden, and the traumatised horror they will experience at the sight of their mother panting them out.

But of course, by the time you realise what's in store (generally as the first one hits 11) it's too late. There's no putting them back.

She'll learn then, I think, with the benefit of age and wisdom. Thank heavens I have both. Or do I?

There was a time, in the midst of building work, when I was fully prepared to strangle two plasterers and an electrician and feed their still twitching remains to my owl, such was their failure to be in the same place at the same time, sober and willing to work.

I said then that I would never again subject myself to the psyche-torturing and blood-lust inducing insanity that is a self-managed building project.

And yet it's the new year, brochures are full of nice things made of beams that can be stuck on the side of your house and I've been rooting around for the name of that nice builder again. The one who said he barely escaped with his sanity last time and would never take on such a project again. I have learned nothing.

Mind you, he said yes.

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