Susannah Kendrick, eight and a half months pregnant, was giving a dinner party. She had just served the lamb curry when she felt a giant contraction, rushed to the bathroom, and was delivered of a baby girl, Trinity, eight minutes later. Yes, minutes, not hours; eight, not 80. In the time it takes to smoke a cigarillo, she issued forth a daughter. If that had been me, I would have commemorated this in some more permanent way, by calling her Octavia, or Whatarush. Her spouse and guests waited till the horse had properly bolted and then locked the stable door - sorry, called an ambulance - and, as they were carting her off, she called, "There's rhubarb crumble in the fridge." I cannot tell this woman a thing about giving birth, but I can tell her that crumble will cook much faster if it's room temperature when it goes in.

Now, if you are not pregnant, you will already have filed this under "curious stories" and moved on. But if you're nine months pregnant, like I am, you approach it with more scepticism. If this had been Kendrick's first baby, she would be a miracle of nature, and should get pregnant again and join a circus. (In fact, it is her third.)

With labour, it's not as simple as short good, long bad. Sure, there's a macho swagger to a short labour (say, under five hours): especially with a first baby, it suggests that a) you did the whole of the so-called "latent" phase without noticing pain, so you must be hard as nails, and b) you managed the intense contractions of the "active" phase without slowing it down by moaning and complaining. People are rightly proud of short labours. My sister gave birth at 9.24am, and was on the phone to me until midnight the night before, I swear just to provide independent verification of the shortness of her labour.

But there is such a thing as too short. Once you're talking about under-an-hour, slipped-out-like-a-wet-pig, oops-I-had-it-in-the-car labours, your internal muscles (one supposes) are a distant memory. You rarely hear people showing off about a labour that short, though that doesn't mean I'm not jealous. Who cares about uterine muscle tone, anyway? I'd give away a lung for an eight-minute labour.