Sometimes, when he's feeding, T clutches his head with his open hand, like he has left his briefcase in a taxi; it's one of a gallery of dinky poses of which I should dearly love a photographic record, but if anyone can come up with a way to get a picture of a breastfeeding baby without getting a great big breast in the way, then I will find a way to give that person a Nobel prize.

I never went to any breastfeeding classes because three years ago, by chance, I met my best friend on her way out of one, and she was fuming. She had been stuck in a room, sucking her thumb in an exercise of studied irrelevance, from 10am until 4.30pm. She said that to warrant going on for that long, they'd have had to teach her how to make it banana-flavoured. She is a swot and a perfectionist, whereas I am lazy and sloppy; imagine how much more bored I would have been.

But don't get me wrong, I am very pro-breast. Everyone is pro-breastfeeding; to be anti is the same as being anti-baby. But when people talk about the issue of breastfeeding - which, lest we forget, is easily the best nutrition for baby, protecting him or her from everything apart from lions, tigers and bears - they often do so as if discussing two facing mountains. Ranged along one are the right-thinking, who only want the best for baby; ranged along the other are Big Business (insert developing-world-hating profit monkeys of your choice), and mothers themselves, who are all secretly gagging to get the baby on powder so they can squidge back into boob tubes and leave junior in creche while they go clubbing.

Before I tried feeding an infant using nothing but ingenuity and my own fat stores, I assumed that the mothers who didn't breast-feed were, as they are portrayed, feckless; I assumed that mothers who mixed breast milk with formula were also feckless, only less so. When friends told me sheepishly that they used formula for one feed a day, but hid it when the health visitor came round, I thought (honestly), "I'm not surprised you're ashamed, you lazy, feckless individual who happens to be my friend."

And now I think this: breast-feeding, when it works, is the best thing in the world. It smells so good, for one thing, that fertility experts believe it makes other women want to have sex (not with you, mind - just generally). But seriously, just imagine it: you have this creature that you love a thousand times more than life, and there's only one thing it wants, and by fantastic good fortune, you, and you alone, can deliver it. What a brilliant feeling. That's the kind of fulfilment people write songs about. Well, they don't, but they could. But when it doesn't work, when maybe the baby itself isn't that straightforward, or maybe your tits have got out of bed the wrong side, and don't look bountiful so much as banana-in-a-Waitrose-bag, or you're on antibiotics, then it is easily the worst thing in the world. It feels like starving a baby to death, through your own inadequacy. It is nerve-shredding.

And anyway, the whole business is like a conversation between your body and your baby - he establishes demand, breasts figure out supply, brain is at no stage informed - so for ages you don't really know what's going on. Sometimes everything is so abundant it's like a scene from the Bible. At other times the baby might feed solidly for six hours, and it's inconceivable to you that he is getting anything out of it beyond some topical body heat around his nose.

Factor in, here, that the signs of baby-dehydration are not straightforward. You can't just feel his nose; you could feel his fontanelle, but you're not exactly sure where it is or what it's supposed to feel like. You have to figure out whether or not he's listless. Well, he's asleep ... is that the same as being listless? Do I wake him up and see how listless he is? But what if he wakes up hungry? I don't have any more milk! There are scores of conditions under which a regular, unfeckless person, who doesn't even own a boob tube, might get up and go to the all-night supermarket for formula. Sometimes it's enough just to know it exists. Formula has saved a lot of lives, you know. It's not the devil's own protein powder it's made out to be.

I haven't used any, mind. My milk supply is suddenly brilliant. I could do the baby on one side and the dog on the other. Don't tell the health visitor. Or the RSPCA.