It’s a cruel trick of nature that after pregnancy, the culmination of which generally results in a human coming out of another human, when you might finally get a chance to get your mind back, without the constant hormonal attacks, you are almost certainly immediately so sleep deprived that you become, once again, quite, quite mental.

Pregmentia is, (so I hear, although not having experienced it first hand I can only trust that it’s not just a conspiracy by pregnant women created as an easy out for any fuck-ups they might make during this time) a state of semi-senility, or dementia which occurs during pregnancy, generally attributed to hormonal imbalances and the fact that you have a parasitic being inside of you literally sucking the life out of you, also the fact that it is probably quite distracting to know that at the end of 9 months you’re gonna have to let this giant thing use your vagina as an exit – they’re not French doors, you know.

This one is marvellous - I've been meaning to write about it for ages, but haven't gotten around to it for so long, I'm ashamed to say that I have now forgotten where I first read this. Probably in a dreadful woman's magazine. Or possibly even in the Sunday papers.

Today's delightful term refers to the product of the following set of circumstances: Let's imagine you are a woman. You are starting to reach an age where, after focusing on your career for 10 or 15 years to the detriment of your personal life, you have gradually comes to the realisation that it is getting fairly late in the day as far as your ability to bear fruit goes. Something must be done, or how will you possibly feel that you have lived a complete life when you are an old woman reflecting on your achievements?

Some women, searching for a solution to this problem, and without a suitable candidate (or 'mandidate', I should say) for creating offspring, decide to go it alone.

Now you and I both know that there is only so much a woman can do on her own. Even in this day and age, we still need something from a man - this is where your mandatory gay best friend comes in (all women have one of course)... You ask your gay best friend to donate sperm so that you can make yourself a delightful baby.
It's perfect, of course: your gay friend is intelligent, good looking, stylish, fun, driven, and best of all has no wife of his own to create complications and awkwardness in such a delicate situation.

How you go about the technicalities of this is of course up to you and your friend - whether you are adventurous enough to try it the traditional way (someone revealed to me recently "it doesn't matter who's touching it - if there is friction, it will get hard" - not sure that's true for everyone), or whether you prefer the more clinical, and certainly more costly, turkey baster method, the result - all going to plan - is the same:
A beautiful bouncing 'gayby' boy or girl. Your very own bundle of joy.

It’s an important topic for me and my almost-not-20-something-anymore-but-as-yet-unmarried-and/or-childless girly mates (i.e. those of us still having a rockin good time – apologies to those of my friends who are blissfully happy Mummies and Daddies, and doing a very fine job of it) – my damn biological clock, until recently deathly silent, has suddenly begun to tick loudly enough to be distracting.

I have a whole plethora of platitudes designed to tame my maternal instincts for a few more years until ‘the time is right’ (or the man)...
“You don’t wanna have children young – you must have as much life experience as possible so you have that wisdom to pass on to your offspring”,
“Nobody needs more than 2 kids these days – you still have plenty of time to manage that”,
“Well if you had a kid you couldn’t be sitting here totally wankered in the middle of a football field in the middle of the day (see photo) with no shoes and no need to be anywhere else now, could you?”
And on it goes, over and over in my head trying to suppress the...
“In some cultures you’re an old maid by now – since about 5 years ago in fact” and
“You know, your body will never recover if you have children too late” and also… no I’m gonna stop now.

So you know how you’re walking down the street and you see a woman pushing a pram and you struggle to decide whether that woman is the Mother or the Grandmother of that child? That’s just not cool. As my friend T. so delicately puts it “It’s disgusting…who wants to make their entry into the world through a curtain of grey pubes?” (She’s spleenful – she works with dozens of middle class career women who have suddenly remembered what their wombs are for and run off to get the turkey baster treatment in their mid forties).

Hence, we invented the word 'Nanma' – it’s a smooshing together of Nana and Ma, or Mother and it aptly describes those new mothers on the, shall we say, mature side, about whom their can be some confusion as to whether the child they are toting about the place is infact their child, or their grandchild.