I hesitate to admit this, a) because of feminism, innit and b) because I worry that it might damage my credibility elsewhere in this newspaper, but I remember this from last time I was pregnant. In the third trimester, I am incredibly stupid. I was thinking this morning about which of my close friends were only children, and got to S. What about S? I thought. Does she have brothers and sisters? And then I remembered that she's my sister. T, who has a doglike cunning far beyond anything exhibited by the dog, has been taking advantage of my confusion to do things he isn't normally allowed to do. I think he must have been keeping a to-do list, ready for when the opportunity presented itself.

Yesterday he squirted his water pistol into the headphone socket of the stereo while I watched. Then he posted some 2p coins into the coffee machine where the pods go, while I watched. Some minutes later - 40? An hour? - I thought maybe I should fish them out, but the task defeated me, and I finished up trying to make coffee with pods and 2ps. I thought I would just end up with a coffee and some hot coins. In fact, I have broken the machine, and he's broken the stereo.

So I decided to have a fizzy drink, got T a juice at the same time, and swapped them by accident . . . He, unused to fizziness, thought maybe he could improve the drink by pouring it on the floor and lapping it up from there. And even though I'd just drunk his juice, I didn't notice anything was up till I looked round and the floor was a puddle, and he was peering into it, transfixed, like a little Diet Coke Narcissus.

On the way to the polling station, I forgot who I was intending to vote for; all I could remember was that it was the one C said looked like a lovely Dulux dog, and I figured they probably wouldn't have their photos on the ballot paper. It struck me that even if they did have their pictures attached, more than one of them might look like a dog. I also forgot that MEPs customarily have their parties written next to their names, so I would have been able to work it out once I got there. Anyway, I ended up going home to check, and momentarily - honestly, not for long - forgot that I'd been intending to go out.

I wouldn't mind if it was a trade-off: you swapped your basic observational and forward-thinking skills for some other plane of understanding, like Picasso and his burst of creativity in his 70s, which he exchanged for a certain amount of mobility, though he still managed to get quite a lot done, ahem, lying down (I wish I could be more specific - Joan Bakewell wrote something amazing once about brainwaves in old age, but unfortunately every time I look for it on the internet, I get distracted by some foolish other thing! This is stupid, I've been here hours. Picasso is dead and I am way too hot!)

The reason celebrities, apparently, have elective caesareans three weeks before their due dates is because if you miss that last bit where you blow up like a puffin, it takes months off your figure-recovery time. I have ceased to believe this stuff about what celebrities do, and how they get twins put in on purpose, and how they are not only too posh to push, they also get liposuction on the way out (though I have not ceased to peddle these rumours).

I'd go further, in fact, and say these aren't just untrue, they're not even meant to be true, they're just symbolic gestational wish-fulfilment like, every time you think, "I wish I could have got twins so I didn't have to do this again" or, "I wish I didn't have to go through labour" or, "why can't you find a good surrogate when you need one?", your mind skips by custom to "I bet that's what Angelina Jolie does." For all I know, Jolie's pregnancies are just a figment of the global imagination. It's possible that Jolie herself doesn't even exist.

Where was I ... Oh yeah: you are not meant to wish away the last eight weeks; it is a jinx and it disrespects the trauma of having a premature baby, and all that ... but I could really do without these last eight weeks.