Having finally showered and washed Saturday night away, I lazily dried myself and started down the stairs to suggest J moves from the sofa to the bed.

I try to ignore the two tables pushed together in our front room. Where there are normally canvases, puddles of ink and every manner of drawing tool is now a small metropolis of glass and tin; the entire contents of our glass cabinet as well as a payload of lager cans cover every inch of wood.

I think about how we decided to put off tackling the job.

I think “As if Mondays need to be made shittier”.

J lights his pre-bed cigarette and I amble through to the kitchen having decided to at least transfer the exposed curling food from teetering dishes into a bin bag. Wrapping my damp bath towel around my waist I hear the double thump that is Stanley returning to our matchbox yard and without looking up, I call out a “hello”. I wait for the metallic thud that is him leaping onto the coal box to come indoors. When I hear it, I look up at the window expecting a small teddy face to appear and complain about his lack of smoked freshwater fish.

What I see instead is a small teddy face with an even smaller mouse body squirming in his wide-open mouth.

I squeal and leap a substantial four inches back, suddenly more repulsed by my own jangling breasts than my bastard cat carrying a still panicked rodent over the dishes in my kitchen and into the lounge.

“He’s got a mouse, a fucking mouse!”

“Oh Stan, you bastard”

“Is it alive?”

I wait for Jto call back. I’ve not moved from the kitchen and become aware of myself still scraping plates and bagging up food.

“Yeah…yeah, it’s alive.

The first time Stanley did the catly thing and deposited a small dead gift in the lounge for us, I managed to look upon the tiny corpse with mild amusement (he did a grand job of scaring the thing to death so that no blood or saliva was visible at all). All the way through childhood my cats brought me presents. They left them in the doorway of my little girl bedroom so I’d not miss them on the way to the bathroom in the morning. It was relatively often that a toe curling scream would erupt from Candy’s Room. My mother would find me with a sticky/wet/bloody under-foot crookedly handing over a small pile of feathery offal.

Since I’ve never had an animal as pathetic as an “indoor” cat, I was glad Stanley started to leave the yard. A dead mouse was at the very least expected.

“Aw, cheers, mate. We love it…(I can’t see any blood, can you? Thank fuck it’s in one piece)”

You know what they say, don’t you? Cats take their kill to their owners. They’re looked upon as gifts. So for the 7 seconds it takes Jay to get the thing into a bag, I treat them as such. “You clever chap, Stan. You shouldn’t have! Not another…”

However, after last night, I can’t help but feel more like a mother picking up a toddler’s wretched spit-soaked toys than anyone being presented with a gift.

Every once in a while I suffer the most terrible degree of awkwardness as a new mother or father witnesses my desperately failed attempt to subtly dismiss their spawn.

It’s not that I dislike babies particularly. I’m just not interested in them. My main problem with them is not so much my impassiveness, but rather the raised eyebrows and bent-knee’d manner in which their carrier presents them. And how my blank stare clashes with it.

I want to die a thousand deaths as I contemplate going in for an all-round unconvincing act of interest. Bending over the small blearily nodding person and cooing “Ooh, aren’t you beautiful?” whips through my mind as something people do in such situations. But where from there? You ask to hold it, don’t you? So you can risk dropping and breaking the most precious thing in someone’s life. I imagine the sound a baby makes when it hits the floor inches from my guilty feet and I quickly decide not to risk anything so horrific.

Damaging children aside, I never know whether I’m dealing with a boy or a girl. Unless the tot has been decorated with one of those god-awful headbands bearing an oversized felt flower, I have to try to mask my scrutiny with merry delight as I go about staring at them, hoping for some unspoken confirmation of sex. At the very least, I would like to start some nervously-constructed sentence with “he” or “she” as opposed to “it”.

There’s no such thing as safety in numbers either. If I’m one of a group of girls, I very seldom get away with silently standing back and waiting for the tirade of “Awwww!”s to diminish. Mothers are like overzealous hostesses who will sniff you out and swoop down on you with the same bastard tray of fish pastries you’ve so desperately tried to get away with not tasting. My shoulders creep a few inches closer to my ears as I hear “oh, Candice- did you get a chance to hold her?”

Being the only girl in a group of men is tricky too. As a clear cut owner of two breasts and a uterus, nature demands that your response to a baby is appropriately dipped in toffee and wrapped in teddies. Unfortunately, my wiring needs seeing to and so, I have no natural response to infants (unless they stagger on four furry legs and have long tails). Any move I make from the moment I see a baby is over-thought and calculated…as if in the end I’ll walk away with a large sum of cold cash or something.

Last night I had to enter a building, in the doorway of which stood a friend holding someone’s daughter or niece or sister or cousin. I teetered on the threshold and stuffed my sweating hands into my pockets. When my wordless smile failed to suffice, the baby was raised even higher, so as to induce something more in the way of acknowledgement.

“Oh, I don’t touch babies” I said “I don’t know how to”.

I was happily surprised when the child was lowered and carried away, presumably to someone more worthy of its darling glow (and shitty nappy).

“That was easy” I thought.

The next time I get offered a fish pastry, I’ll come clean right away and say I don’t like things that stink