Guess what I don't want? Babies. I never have and I never will. Please don't tell me I'll change my mind. It's patronising, and how the hell do you know anyway?

I denounced motherhood when I was young. Seven or so. My earliest thought on the matter was my earliest thought on babies altogether and it went: isn't it all a bit - vulgar? It has become more and more pronounced as I've got older. All the stuff that was supposed to make me reconsider has happened to me; and I haven't. Advanced age (I am 37), falling in love, peer pressure from breeding friends... So, no, I don't want babies.

Why don't I want babies? I'll ignore for a moment the insolence of the question. I'll ignore the fact that nobody ever asks a woman who wants kids why she wants kids; no one ever tells a woman who expresses a deep-rooted compulsion to procreate that she'll change her mind. Instead, I'll say: for lots of reasons. It's not that I am a power-crazed career bitch. I mean - I am; but that's unrelated. I didn't want babies long before that madness kicked in - the no-baby policy has facilitated it, but hasn't compounded it.

And it's not that I don't like babies. I am ambivalent towards them. I am like your average bloke in that I don't especially want to cuddle or touch or smell them, though I'll do it out of politeness. (Well, maybe not the smelling. And, I have to say I find those women who throw themselves at any baby, whether or not they know it or its parents, perplexing. It's unseemly, isn't it? Like throwing yourself at a man?) I adore my goddaughter, but I can take or leave all other small people.

I really don't like what parenthood does to grown-ups. This latest generation of parents - oh, it's odd, isn't it? I like the ones I know. Mostly. They're OK, because they're my friends - I chose them, they are by definition better than those parents I don't know. (Even if they aren't - I know for a fact that they were better, once, back before they had children, and I reckon they'll resume something approaching normal service once the buggers have gone to school. Won't they?) But modern parents en masse? That pampering cult of Bugaboo-wielding, Mumsnet-bothering dullness?

Spare me. Spare me the one-track conversations. Spare me the self-righteousness, the sense of entitlement (you, with the toddler-on-wheels: astonishing news just in! You don't have pavement priority over the rest of the world!). Spare me the pretensions of martyrdom and selflessness. (It's my experience that parenthood doesn't make anyone less selfish. Humans simply extend the sphere of their selfishness when they have kids, so that it embraces the kids and dishes out a fierce battering to the rest of the world. Also - no one has a baby out of selflessness. You really want to be selfless? Adopt, lover.) And please spare me the pitying glances (I promise I don't want what you have. Honestly, I find it mind-boggling that you don't want what I have. Are you quite sure you're not poleaxed with jealousy?). While I always offer pregnant women my seat on the Tube, on my darkest days I also find myself thinking: let's get something straight here. Your condition is self-inflicted, you made the choice to get knocked up, and you presumably knew it'd leave you incapacitated in this way. I don't know if you deserve my seat any more than you would if you were incapacitated by a banging hangover, say, or a great deal of shopping.

So part of the reason I don't want babies is because I don't want to transform into one of them. There are quite enough of them out there, already.

There are other reasons. I like my lifestyle, my career, my body, my capacity to run off to New York at short notice if the opportunity arises. I like that my money is my own to squander. I like that my weekends can be slept away, or drunk away, or read away; that I am not sleep deprived, or if I am, I can remedy that easily. I like how last-minute my time is, how disorganised, how guilt-free.

I really, really like how certain I am about this. It's probably the only thing I never fret over. I never wonder if I'm making the right decision in remaining childless. And you know what? Screw the rational arguments, the truth of why I don't want babies - the only thing I ever really need to say is this: because I don't.

Mine is not an easy position to maintain. Partly because our society won't have it. Partly because our popular culture denies it. The great big emotional drama of my entire generation - infertility and all its attendant horrors, IVF, endless tests, artificial hormones, the prospect of a childless future - does not touch me. Everyone I know is caught up in this nightmare in some way. I am miserable for my friends with fertility issues, of course, for my friends who desperately want families. They're so, so sad about it. At the same time, I do have to stop myself going: "Seriously?" every time they cry on my shoulder. As for me, I have to constantly deal with the suggestion that I am wrong, or abnormal, or damaged because I do not want the very thing that everyone else wants so desperately. How perverse of me. How contrary. How (someone actually said this to me recently) not normal.

It doesn't help that fertility is the great cultural preoccupation of the day.

While TV and film scriptwriters and commercial novelists have given up

flogging the idea that marriage and monogamy will save us, they now seem extremely attached to the idea that motherhood will save us.

Even the cool films perpetuate this new romantic ideal: Juno, Knocked Up, Baby Mama... Today's rom coms end on maternity wards; five years ago they ended at the right end of a church aisle. The iconography of happy endings is no longer flouncy white dresses and engagement rings - it's blue lines on pregnancy test kits and outward-bulging tummies. In this world my not wanting babies is shorthand for my not wanting to be happy. How perverse of me. How contrary. Et cetera.

Am I going to have a ghastly awakening 10 years down the line? Am I going to get bludgeoned over the head by the realisation that my life is empty, meaningless and loveless and I'm staring into the crevasse of a lonely old age? Maybe. And then maybe not.

But you know what? I'm not going to start breeding now, just in case. No bloody way. Because - do you know what I don't want? What I really don't want? Babies. That's what.