A Lewes friend is due to give birth to her first baby in a few weeks, and I dropped in to see the gear she’s bought. Actually, being the most efficient woman on the planet, she has a spreadsheet of all the kit she needs/has got. We were agreeing that end-of-pregnancy shopping is a pleasant diversionary tactic from the awful thought of birth. I developed quite a relationship with the Tots to Teens staff and Dawn in the Baby Shop in my last few months of pregnancy. Post-birth you soon realise that you don’t need much kit to begin with, although having breasts can come in useful. But it’s hard to know what you really do need until you’ve tried going outside with a baby. Shell-shocked and knackered, you find yourself armed for your first solo adventure to buy a pint of milk, armed with a kit bag full of everything you could possibly need to summit K2, only to find the front door has slammed shut with the baby and the door-keys still inside. And the contents of the nappy (et al) bag gets increasingly bonkers as time goes on. Well mine did. What started as a rational set of nappy changing stuff and a few tasteful toys descended into crumbled rice crackers, stale Bikkipegs, dried out wet-wipes, and half a squashed banana. Lord Lucan was probably in there, who would ever know? A woman told me about tidying her bag after the children had started nursery. She found a 2lb jar of piccalilli in the bottom that must have been lurking there years. I’m hoping to find an old nappy bag with my brain in it one day.