oooh! who's a likkle pain, den?

they arrive from Cambridge early on a Friday evening, a picture of domestic bliss on my doorstep: Cathy, my best friend from college and four months pregnant, Paul, her husband, and Flora, their 16-monthold baby daughter.

A sturdy Volvo is parked outside (the GTi had to go - not enough storage space) and we make three journeys to and fro, weighed down with Mothercare accessories: fold-up cot, buggy, high chair and two weeks worth of disposable nappies.

In deference to their visit, my boyfriend and I have scrubbed, tidied and, wherever possible, disinfected every square inch of our small one- bedroom flat. The least we can do, we naively assume, is to make sure our home is a pristine, hygienic play area, perfect for the Little Angel.

"Whooah," says Paul as he swings baby Flora around on his shoulder. Cathy stares devotedly at their progeny now gurgling with pleasure. "Oooh, who's a loverley-girl-den?" she coos.

I quickly realise that these expressions of parental enthusiasm require a response. After each one they glance at me as if to ask: "How can you remain mute in the presence of our unique creation?" For politeness' sake, I join in and raise my voice to the same ridiculous high pitch as theirs. "Oooh, you like dat mirror, don't you Flora. Who's reflection is dat den?" I hear myself saying in a cutesy accent. She giggles and kisses the mirror, covering the surface in an opaque white goop that dribbles slowly down to meet the carpet.

"Naughty Flora - Mummy will wipe it up." Cathy fusses over the mirror with a tissue while the toddler from hell heads towards our CD rack. She begins to open each one and then licks the discs - dousing them in industrial- strength viscous saliva: so resilient that, once solidified, only a blow torch will remove it.

It's not that I dislike the idea of babies. I'm willing to accept that they will, given a quarter of a century, develop into attractive and likable human beings worthy of my attention and interest. But I do begin to resent their creators, the friends-turned-parents (FTPs) who irrationally believe that a bundle of anti-social excretions, smells and noises should be the object of intense and prolonged admiration.

I'm talking about close acquaintances who, after the birth of their children, fill whole photographic albums with identical shots of their offspring: asleep, awake, feeding and then - whe-hey - asleep again. They will relate identical tales to justify the conviction that their baby merits special attention: "It's not just me, you know. I was in the supermarket last week and this woman came up to me and said, `Gosh, what a beautiful baby.' " These same strangers would be equally complementary to your pet dog.

But objectivity is a stranger to every FTP, as is curiosity about other people's lives and the ability to string whole sentences together. "So how's your ... Oh God ... Flora, not the plug socket," pleads Cathy, her head turned away from me. My job? My relationship? My life? Alas, she'll never know - I can't be bothered to explain. Instead I gaze inanely at my friend as she tries to pacify her daughter.

I can understand, with the patter of the monster's tiny cloven feet, interest in friends will always take second place. I find it harder to accept that what scant interest remains is focused entirely on domestic arrangements and your pitiable (in their eyes) state of childlessness.

Why can't FTPs ask about your flourishing career/ love life/ bank balance? No, they want to know when you're going to suffer in the same manner as themselves.

"So, do you think you'll ever have children?" asks Cathy, emphasising the "ever" as if, at the age of 30, my next concern should be hormone replacement therapy rather than reproduction. "I know what you think - but until you do it, you can't understand how marvellous it is," she opines.

Parenthood, like marriage, is an institution that members are desperately keen to sell as a concept to the uninitiated. I suspect insecurity is the root cause - by persuading others of the advantages, they are really trying to reassure themselves. Why else are FTPs so keen to get us, as it were, in the club? Because the less they are confronted with lifestyles like mine - replete with freedom and the selfish pursuit of pleasure - the less chance they have to regret what they willingly gave up.

But rather than gall Cathy with tales about the joys of adulthood sans children, I throw her a sliver of hope. "I may want them in a few years' time," I concede. That's still not good enough. "Well, you know the risks if you leave it later than 35," she warns smugly, stroking her swollen belly.

Unjustly, some tacit rule decrees that single people can never lecture FTPs in an equally self-righteous manner. Instead we do the decent thing and congratulate them on producing such Little Angels. I would love to tell them just how much of life they're missing out on. How one-dimensional their existence has become: up to their elbows in baby poo, exhausted by early evening, awake at dawn to repeat the same dull routine.

Yet we collude, feeding their hormonal delusion that they have pulled off some extraordinary feat. And the fact that half the population can manage it doesn't appear to lessen their sense of achievement.

By Saturday morning, the flat looks shell-shocked and I feel like a refugee in my own home. The carpet is caked with half-digested rusks and splodges of raspberry jam - stuck to it are shreds of paper napkin. My alarm clock lies in a pool of carrot puree. Amid the detritus, Cathy lays Flora on the changing- mat and removes her nappy, full of something that resembles Dijon mustard. "I can't wait to see you doing this," she says, cheerfully lobbing the soiled item into our bin. "Then you'll realise how much you're both missing out on."