People are having babies all over the place, which is fabulous if one adores babies in general, but not so fabulous if you’re not that keen on them, unless they’re yours or closely related, then you can gaze adoringly at the little miracles for ever. I find that 10 minutes admiring the dinky little fingers and heavenly widgy face and saying, “What a lovely baby,” is about enough for me.

And it’s not just the looking. You often have to do holding, which makes me nervous — another ghastly admission. What if I drop it, or don’t hold its delicate little head properly? Or, having sensed that I am a babyphobic witch, it starts screeching and weeping? My friend Fielding agrees.

“Other people’s babies look like babies,” he says sensibly, but he did once make a ghastly anti-baby blunder. Someone rang to say that a friend of a friend’s sister’s child had just had a third baby. Fielding managed the obligatory congratulations, thought he’d put the phone down and called out to the wife, “That’s all the world needs. Another freaking baby,” with the phone not down at all. “But I look round,” he says, “I see half the world starving and the rest of it stuffed with lunatics, and I can’t help coming to a fairly Swiftian conclusion.”

The persons with the babies may not realise that the visitor is perhaps going through personal hell and torment. Worse still they may have a mother desperate for a grandchild. “When am I going to be a grandma?” my mother would sigh, her blue eyes filling with tears. But luckily my daughter arrived, utterly beautiful and endlessly fascinating. Now she’s grown up, but unlike me, she loves baby-visiting. She loves the gazing, holding, name-choosing and shopping for darling little outfits.

Inspired by her example I did manage a pleasant half-hour baby visit last week, followed by an admiring five-minute gaze at next-door’s baby on my way home, then I rushed indoors in an unnatural way, to gaze lovingly at the dogs, took them out for a walkie and met an acquaintance with her dog and new baby. She looked knackered, her eyes sunken, hair awry and her baby squawking. “I don’t know why anybody bothers,” she said fiercely, but in a rather refreshing way. I bet she was pretending.