Last Friday, as Big Ben prepared to strike the hour we had all been waiting for, labour wards up and down the country echoed with the sound of straining pelvises. The pressure was on: in the week leading up to millennium night, victims of Channel 4's April 'bonk night' were furiously drinking raspberry tea, having sex and eating curries in the hope that their babies would arrive on the stroke of midnight - bringing with them fame and fortune.
Who, then, is our millennium first-born? We're not talking just symbolic glory here, but sponsorship deals estimated at £1m and six-figure tabloid negotiations. As PR man Max Clifford puts it, 'You could make a fortune.'
Consequently, from John O'Groats to Lands End, tiny red-fisted rivals are lining up to stake their claim. There's wee Daniel, son of Joanne McConville and Robert Gordon, who made a brave stab at the title by emerging from his mother at 12.04am in Glasgow.
He was pipped, though, by little Andrew Watson in Durham (12.03am), while, according to the Sun newspaper, a gorgeous seven-pounder (as yet unnamed) shot out of her mother Alison Webb in Birmingham 15 seconds after midnight. But the true champ seems to be tiny Tamara Abomide, who - allegedly - made it through the amniotic fluid a whole second sooner. I use the term 'allegedly', because there's the small question of what constitutes the moment of birth. If seconds count, we need to know which ones: is the moment of birth when the head appears (or feet, if it's a breech birth)? When the whole body comes out? Some define it as the moment the cord is cut and others insist that it's when you take your first breath.
The confusion and conspiracy of silence was eventually broken by a midwife friend of a friend who reluctantly divulged, off the record, that she believes the moment of birth to be 'once the baby is out of the mother's body'. Calculating this moment to the nanosecond cannot be an easy task. Call me a nit-picker, but if it was only Tamara's head that appeared 14 seconds after midnight, then it could have taken her mother rather longer to produce her entire 8lb 15oz, in which case even little Daniel, four minutes past the magic hour, might be the title-holder.
Globally, more than 350,000 babies were delivered in the first 24 hours of the millennium, 2,000 of which popped out in Britain. But unless national hospital clocks were secretly synchronised, then this millennium baby stuff is, in fact, total nonsense. If the Birmingham hospital's clock was a second slow, then baby Webb has lost out to Tamara on a technicality.
Fortunately, baby Webb's parents, Alison and her partner Mark Heafield, don't give a damn. They tore up their £100,000 newspaper contract and turned down spin-off sponsorship deals, saying that their top priority is privacy. The church greeted the news with delight. In the words of the Venerable John Barton, Archdeacon of Aston: 'It is an amazing display of non-materialism... [they] have turned down fame and wealth, and if they carry on bringing up their daughter like this it will be a brilliant example to everyone.' He may have a point.
