With the long school summer holidays coming to an end, I would like to offer my annual thanks to the nation’s parents for another six weeks of sterling service. Not merely for raising future generations of doctors, scientists and Love Island contestants, but also for my annual refresher course on fertility choices. It’s still a no from me.

In Westfield Stratford City this week, for example, I watched a father sitting by the outdoor human-sized chess set. This board is a lovely touch by the shopping mall, giving locals of all ages some free, open-air fun. On any warm day, adults and older kids queue up for games, but not on this day, as a small screaming boy of about six years old had screwed the bottom off the man-sized rook and was spraying the sand inside it (intended to weigh it down) all over the board. His father sat motionless on a bench close by.

As his son moved on to begin emptying the queen, the man stared not at the boy, but through him. It was week six of the summer holidays. This father’s eyes had seen so much. So much screaming, so much destruction. He reminded me of Charlie Sheen in his “Hell is the impossibility of reason” monologue in the Vietnam movie Platoon. It was clear that reasoning with his child about why it might be nicer to, say, not make a noise like a reversing Securicor van while wantonly wrecking the chess set-up was an option the father no longer considered.

Later, in Boots, I watched a girl of around 10 in full meltdown because, as far as we could all hear, her mother had put restrictions on her iPhone usage. As the mother tried to suggest that six full weeks of her daughter’s tweenage girlgang slagging off each other’s pouting Snapchats, forming online cliques, swapping allegiances and leaving shady Instagram comments had sent the girl quite mad, her daughter became increasingly aggressive. As I left the chemist, I thanked the lord for the Levonelle One Step morning-after pill. Or as one of my more realistic mother friends wrote on Facebook last week, “I am at the fucking Peppa Pig Live Show. Use a Durex, people.”

I do like children. Just not enough. This still feels like a radical thing for a woman to say. (And children do like me, too. I have a big capacity for silliness, plus I resemble a sort of claymation witch, which they find intriguing.) But I didn’t ever truly want one. My theory is that about 40% of women are born with the genes that mean they sniff a baby’s head and feel their destiny. They’ll have their brood by all means necessary, even if their body works against them. Then there’s the 40% who have them, usually post-30, due to a sort of existential crisis about legacy, purpose, guilt and who’ll show face at their care home. Then, I feel, there’s the 20% like me who delay and wriggle and sidestep parenthood. We give it a swerve. We know that eventually the question itself will self-combust – typically around the age of 44, my age presently, when it has long been considered tantamount to child cruelty to hatch something so cursed from your fossilised nou-nou, before standing at the schoolgates humiliating it.

But now, thanks to the likes of Brigitte Nielsen pushing out a fifth baby at 54, and US senator Tammy Duckworth, 50, taking her newborn to protest against Trump’s immigration policy, it seems there’s no end point. No real excuse not to keep trying. Women’s fertility has never been in such a weird place. Fifty is the new 40! Sixty is the new 51! Wombwise, the fat lady never really sings. There are new medical ways and means to reproduce if you have cash, patience and emotional staying power.

There’s limitless time, it seems, to change one’s mind. I found myself recently ogling YouTube videos of Janet Jackson’s October 2017 State Of The World tour performances. Aged 51, she was slinky, powerful and perfect, nailing all the moves and high kicks of the Rhythm Nation routine. This was just short of a year after she gave birth to her baby Eissa, and in that time she’d dropped about 70lbs, escaped an unhappy marriage, and re-learned all the shoulder swivels from the What Have You Done For Me Lately video. And for a moment, I thought, “Maybe I could do this. I could have it all.” Not the shoulder pads and the pop’n’lock routine, no; but the limitless energy, the stellar career, the freedom to pursue my creative needs, plus the baby, without changing my whole life. But then I remembered Westfield Stratford City.

And this, British parents, is why I thank you from the bottom of my heart for summer 2018. The broken father on the sandy chessboard. The mother in Boots with the tantrumming tween. All of you in Giraffe right now pretending you like the brunch. Everyone who has been strong-armed into shelling out £75 for some cross-eyed monstrosity from the Build-A-Bear Workshop. Everyone spending today panic-buying school sports kit that will be lost in the first week. Thank you for raising the future. You’re all amazing. But it’s still a no from me.