So, it's been a year since Buggerlugs was born. It feels as though I should be taking a moment to reflect on the transformations wrought, the life lessons learned, the great mysteries of existence penetrated and the eternal verities at their hearts revealed. That sort of thing, you know?

Unfortunately, the greatest surprise of the past 12 months has been how utterly unchanged I am – except at the superficial level on which nappy-changing, food-puréeing and night-feeding operate. I think this is because most of the things that stagger new parents were already present in abundance in my life. To wit:

1. Guilt There's nothing you can teach me about guilt. Guilt is the fuel I run on. For as long as I can remember, I have lain in bed greeting each new dawn by running through a mental checklist of all the ways I am failing myself, my loved ones and the world at large. Don't have a pension. Don't recycle, support my sister or vacuum the stairs enough. I'm overweight and behind with all my domestic, administrative and professional tasks. I'm selfish, lazy and still haven't found the moral courage to give up my job and retrain as something worthwhile, such as a teacher or social worker. And I lie in bed too long worrying self-indulgently. Once the surging tide of nameless remorse, shame and generalised culpability has subsided to manageable proportions, I get up. If it ever receded completely, I don't know whether I would find myself gasping and choking to death, unable to breathe on dry land, or quickly, joyously sprouting new legs and scurrying off to explore this strange and beautiful new world.

So you can't daunt me with the constant fear of failing a bundle of helpless new life that I've ushered unasked into the world! Pah – 'tis but a bagatelle.

2. Chaos If anything, having a baby has imposed more, not less, order on life. There are now three, relatively evenly-spaced points in the day at which food happens in our house, where there never were before. Bins get emptied, papers and assorted other detritus put away, leftovers refrigerated. If I don't, the baby will eat something bad, slip on something or stab himself with something and die. It is a spur to decluttering, I can tell you.

3. Curtailment of liberty This is a problem only if you ever used your liberty while you had it. I once spent eight straight days indoors. I noticed only when I walked through a shaft of sunlight coming in down the side of a half-fallen-down blind and flinched like a Mogwai being splashed with water. An infant would have to try a lot harder than this one to put a crimp in that sort of style.

So I cannot say that the lustre of my social life or the glamour of my evenings has been noticeably dimmed. The imminent end of Desperate Housewives may reduce its wattage slightly, but this is hardly the baby's fault.

Of course, this only goes to show how very much better at life other people have always been than I am. I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who has been busted down to my standards overnight by the advent of offspring. If it helps, you become used to the guilt after a while. It wears a sort of calloused groove in your soul, always aching but never sharply painful. Takes about 10 years. You're very welcome.