If I went to bed Right Now, I might get the full eight hours, time spent waking up to soothe a fretful Piglet aside.

But I am not going to go to sleep right now, because I am writing this.  And the glow of the computer screen is going to adjust my hormone levels, apparently, so that everything goes out of sync and I end up wide awake and wired as one of the Happy Mondays at the Hacienda in 1989, unable to sleep for three weeks.

And this is what it has been like every night since I last wrote on here, and that is why I never do.  Sleep wins out every time.

On Saturday Piglet went to his first birthday party. Not his own, obvs, as he is only ten and a half months.  The venue was a thing called a baby cafe.  In Islington.  We don’t have such things in Wembley, as no one would be so shamelessly middle class as to actually name their business a baby cafe, instead of something much more sensible, like a soft play centre, or Cafe Nero, even if it ends up as the former due to the preponderance therein of both babies and coffee.

Anyway, you can imagine what it was like walking into this baby cafe.

In short, it was a peculiarly upper middle class version of Hell.

There were women in Thai fishermen’s pants of baggy denim with elasticated waists; there were bespectacled middle class men strapping on special trainers designed specifically so that feet don’t slide off the pedals whilst cycling (doubtless with the baby being pulled along behind in one of those little baby-tents): there was eggs benedict being eaten; there were flat whites being drunk out of glass cups with no handles (rather precariously, given the surroundings, clientele and overall theme); there was a selection of tasteful wooden toys strewn across the floor, and with few exceptions, every parent in there, I am delighted to report, at least looked older than me.*

It was like walking in a dazed and confused state out of a mine in which you had been working for the last twenty five years as a pit pony and suddenly seeing the sun, blinking around for a second wondering what had hit you, and then deciding it was all rubbish and going blind.

These are now my peeps, I found myself thinking in wonderment.  THESE ARE MY PEEPS.  I am one of THEM.

I am that woman in the fisherman pants, who just wants to be comfortable whilst lugging a baby around in an organic sling (in my case, they were Topshop leggings.  I do have a shred of dignity).

I am that man on the bike with the baby-tent, regaling a nearby collection of mothers with the triumphant words “I bet you’re all wondering what THESE SHOES are for, aren’t you?”

I am the one who replied “I already know.  I used to be really into cycling.”  And then, with a sigh, “used to,” as though life as we know it is now over for all of us.

I am definitely all the women still breastfeeding children old enough to go to secondary school.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is my life.  These are my peeps.

*This does not mean they were.  I am of the opinion that I look about seventeen.  The mirror suggests otherwise, and that somewhat alarmingly I may in fact have inherited my father’s terrifyingly accelerated rate of ageing, but I’m pretty sure it’s lying.