NEWSFLASH!  NEWSFLASH!

Piglet has twenty-one brothers and sisters.

Or something like that.

Obvs. this is not my doing.  I barely have Piglet, let alone twenty-one other hidden children squirrelled away somewhere.

The reason I know this is because I registered Piglet’s birth with the sperm bank, and although they have so far not managed to send me the photo of the donor that I requested (Piglet might want to see his father one day, right?  Plus all my extended family want to have a good look at him so they can make a more informed decision about who he looks like.  When he was born, my all my aunt could manage was “hasn’t he got a lovely shaped head?”) they have added me to their social media thingy where you can “connect” with all the other people who have children with the same donor.  There are twenty-one of them.  Which is actually a fairly modest figure considering that the limit for the number of families a donor can, er, donate to, is fifty in the United States and ten in Britain.  And that’s not including all the other countries a donor’s emissions could potentially be sent to.

Anyway, some of the other lucky recipients have set up a Facebook group for those who have received sperm from my donor or another donor who is apparently my donor’s brother (quite the family business!) so they can all talk to each other.  I have sneakily Facebook-stalked some of these people and looked at their children and some of them LOOK JUST LIKE PIGLET.  It is UNCANNY.  Anyone would think they were related or something.  This is notwithstanding the fact that there are a great many babies that look like Piglet, including a baby sat on the next table to us in Grupo Lounge in Bristol when we were in there having brunch a few weeks ago, and several of the babies whose pictures are used to illustrate The Essential First Year by Penelope Leach.  Even Dermot O’Leary of X Factor fame has been mooted as a potential lookalike.  Perhaps these too are all members of Piglet’s extensive worldwide family.  Anyway, I am now in the position of checking Facebook frantically every five minutes to see if the moderators of the Facebook group have accepted my request to join yet, so that I can have a proper look at these children that are apparently Piglet’s genuine relations, and maybe find out some interesting titbits from their parents, such as, have any of your children so far grown up to be an axe murderer?  No?  Oh well that’s great then.  The genes are obviously OK.

Hang on.  What if their children are all awful?  And the parents are not?  Perhaps I am going to find out more than I actually want to know here.  After all, as that great sage of the nineties, Dr Alban, once proclaimed in his classic hit It’s My Life, a little knowledge is dangerous.  And that song was used to advertise tampons.  I rest my case.