Today is my birthday – I’m 36. I’m celebrating, since you ask, with an outing to Richmond Deer Park, followed by champagne and pizza in the garden. I know: so civilised and mature.

Anyway, just over a year ago, heading for 35, I was sitting in a pub with my father in central London and I asked him a favour. With his coolly quantitative analytical skills – he studied physics as a young man – could he please help me decide whether I should freeze my eggs before I turned 35? I felt overwhelmed by the data, and extremely stressed about the widespread idea that as soon as I hit 35 my fertility would fall off a cliff. The problem, however, was that at that moment in time I didn’t have a clear read on wanting children. I could go either way.

My father combed the research and a week or so later helped me decide not to do it. First, it seemed that 35 was not the cliff I had thought it to be. I had more time. Plus, in light of my ambivalence about having children, the exhausting intrusiveness and expense of the procedure (around £10,000) rendered it simply nonsensical for me. So I laid the question to rest, and said to myself that if I wanted to have a child in the next five or so years, then somehow or other it would happen.