We have a baby monitor so we can check that Ray is OK when he’s sleeping and we’re in a different room. One of my greatest fears is not that I should leave the camera on in the bedroom and forget to turn the monitor off in the kitchen, and that one of the kids should see me naked, or having sex (not likely at the mo), or tidying badly. No, my greatest fear is that for some weird reason or other, the monitor and the camera do a switcheroo and someone in the bedroom (OK, Joab) gets to see what I’m really doing on my own in the kitchen.

I say that because I do weird things when I’m near a fridge. I treat it like the television. I keep looking at it, hoping that something exciting is going to happen, and I’m going to be entertained for hours on end. My fridge scavenges, alas, usually last only minutes: I try things out, abandon them, and then say “Where did all the big food shops go?”

Right now I’m sitting in an oversized beach shirt and a too-small bikini, purchased less than one hour ago from Brixton H&M. When I want to get out of London I usually end up in Brixton. That’s as far as 3-month-old Ray will allow me on a normal day, when the restrictive 2 hour window in between feeding him, and him sleeping means, OK, I can go somewhere, grab something for dinner, and perhaps go aisle hopping at H&M.

I can pretend I’m a different person, as I pluck weird, slightly cheap looking shoes from their hangers. Pleather shoes with punch-out holes that do funny things to my little toes, and completely flat soles that do illegal things to the shape of my ankles. I usually end up buying three things, and returning them three days later.

Anyway, in this soon to be returned bikini (don’t worry, I kept my knickers on) I’ve just eaten half a rotisserie chicken with orange mayo sauce of indeterminable age, plus two big balls of beetroot, some slightly fizzy kimchi, and a date for pudding. I think I’ll probably have a Magnum ice-cream (without dairy, because I’m trying that out for a while to see if it helps soothe Ray’s digestion) because the date was just to make me feel a bit healthy. God I miss cream teas.

That’s all I’ve got for you this week. What are your weird eating habits? Do you eat noisily when alone, but hate people doing the same when they’re next to you?

Next week I’m going to write about what was happening exactly a year ago when Joab and I did our embryo transfer. What a strange, lonely, hard time it was. There was a first, negative pregnancy test, early pregnancy bleeding which I was convinced was a miscarriage, and absolutely no symptoms whatsoever. I think what I want to try and capture is how bloody mad I felt at that time.

Yesterday I looked at photos from last June and can see so much of what was going on. I can remember feeling so certain that I couldn’t possibly be pregnant. And yet, here we are. Me, in a too-small bikini, eating chicken with my fingers while my baby sleeps in his pram in the hall.

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