This just arrived at my door.

It was not at all embarrassing.  NOT AT ALL.

For a start, the two concierges downstairs didn’t notice anything remotely amiss.  They were not engaging in any kind of conversation with the courier from UPS about “ooh look at this, ooh it needs to be kept cold apparently!” which I could not overhear down the intercom.  Then the courier did not even bat an eyelid whilst handing the package to me, let alone chortle heartily “HERE’S YOUR BODY PARTS!”

Then, while I signed the delivery note, he did not ask any questions at all which might have suggested that this particular delivery was in any way a little bit out of the ordinary and perhaps not your average book or DVD from Amazon, such as; “IS IT ACTUALLY HUMAN THEN?  WHAT IS IT?”

Thanks, Danish sperm bank, for adding that lovely sticker with the words “TISSUES AND CELLS” and that tantalising little footnote about the case containing “human tissue.”

I had images of the police turning up on my doorstep, demanding to know why I was importing human body parts and was I in fact a cannibal/mass murderer/both, so in order to avoid this, I ended up blurting out what it was.

“I don’t want to say!” I protested, before realising that this made the whole enterprise sound even more dodgy.  “OK it’s sperm!”  then added “from a sperm bank” just to clarify in case he thought I had got it through some dodgy means rather than through a recognised commercial enterprise that presumably conforms to international laws.  “For insemination” I then added, in case he wondered what I could possibly be doing with a load of human sperm and did I in fact have a laboratory set up in my flat, where I was running my own secret government cloning laboratory, manufacturing cloned soldiers for some future war when I am going to be a Blofeld-style Bond villain with ambitions to be Queen of the World.

“Oh right,” said the courier with interest.  “So do guys come round and do that here then?”

Horrible images flashed through my mind of what that might entail.  Although to be fair, surely this was no worse than inviting round Absolute Bastard to do the deed au natrel, so to speak.

“Er, something like that.”

Something which is never going to be done again.  It either works, or it’s the IVF.  I am SO not going through this again.