When T was about a week old, the midwife came round to do his heel-prick test. All really early baby tests are incredibly obscure, you never hear about them in the entire rest of a human being's life. They're constantly being tested for wonky hips and a problem generating vitamin K. You will never meet a midwife or a doctor who doesn't try to spatchcock your baby and then say: "Good." The heel-prick blood test, because it occurs when they're so young, by definition happens when they're eating, sleeping or already crying. Ideally, you want them to be already crying, because if some stranger stabs them in the foot while they are innocently doing one of those other two things, then even if they are too small to give you a look of terror and betrayal - which they are - you can easily fill in those gaps with your imagination. My midwife did the heel-prick too early and had to do it again, and I am not going to tell you how I felt about this, because it will make me sound psychotic.

The eight-week jabs are much, much worse. Apart from being born - and the time he fell out of bed for reasons that were so my fault I've only now, 10 weeks later, been able to say those words out loud - he'd known no pain his whole life, and here we are, stabbing him in the leg. "Let's just wait till he stops crying and do the other leg," says the nurse, who is clearly trying to make me cry as well. What's she trying to inoculate us against, human pain? "Ooh, they don't normally cry this long," she says, and then, "look at that, he's gone bright red! They don't normally go bright red!" "I think it's because he's crying ..." "We'll wait to check he isn't having a reaction before we do the next one," she says, and now it really is torture, because we're waiting for an era of peace that definitely, positively isn't going to happen until me and T have walked out and arrived home. Finally, she gets tired and just gives him the second jab anyway, and we get home, and I open the door, and T has pretty much calmed down, and I pick up the post to find we're booked into the TB clinic the week after.

I've heard terrible stories about the TB injection - it's sub-cuticular, so they basically have to rough your baby up a bit, make a scratch, before they stick the needle in. And plus, the jabs are done for a whole postcode on the same morning, so it's a maelstrom of screaming infants: the place sounds like an abattoir. My best friend went with her daughter, and from the road outside her little one said: "Why are those children crying?" J said: "I don't know, maybe they're hungry." And her daughter - who is rather sharp - said: "Why else might they be crying?"

It's too much. I do not want to take T to the Streatham baby abattoir on a Saturday morning. I want to stay in and play with a Whoozit and, in good time, when he's 13 and I'm not there, he can have his BCG then. My sister's midwife said it was because of all the foreigners in the area; they had to step up immunisations because they weren't routine in the emigrant's home countries. I wish she hadn't said this. I don't want to be a racist refusnik; I want to be a coward refusnik. There's a difference.

In the end, I got round it by being out of London. I have another appointment for three months hence, by which time maybe TB will have been eradicated or I will be on valium.

This still left us with the 12-week injections, and I secured a promise from my mother that she would take him, but when it came to it, the London International Mime Festival got in the way. I guess when you've chosen someone to accompany your screaming baby through injections because they are quite deaf, the odds are they might also like mime. Instead, C went in and I waited outside. Amazingly, this was even worse than taking him in myself. It took much longer than I remembered it (nine-and-a-half minutes, since you ask), so I logically assumed that T had had a reaction and died. When they emerged, I could hear them all the way down the corridor, C, T and the nurse, with little T bright red, again, and his mouth stretched square like an outraged post box. "They don't normally cry like this," said the nurse, "did he do this last time?" "Well, yeah, why do you think I sent him in with his father?"

Against mumps, measles and rubella, I plan to find some way to immunise him with herbs.