Month One, Day Eleven

So that's that, then. Assuming the hot baths haven't killed them all off, there should be around 250 million miniature swimmers hurtling towards my egg, which may or not be suffering from alcoholic poisoning.

So now I am waiting - waiting for a sign to let me know that conception has occurred. Certainly, nothing as alien and momentous as the beginning of life could happen in my own body without me being alerted to it.

I think I am waiting for a noise, or an explosion, or perhaps some God-like voice speaking a language I've never heard before, whispering that I am With Child. Then I will run my hands knowingly over my belly, my face suffused with serenity and devotion. I'll be deeply aware of every newly-made cell dividing and growing, unknowable to all but me. This is going to be the quietest, the sweetest romance.

'Your boobs will hurt,' my friend told me. 'That'll be the first sign.'

Now and then, I hit them to see. They don't hurt.

But surely, something must happen. There were 250 million of them. I know lots of them are slightly stupid, and they swim in circles or in the wrong direction, but out of 250 million tiny little sperm, it is reasonable to expect that one might find its way to that huge, scented moon of an egg.

Women's eggs have a scent. According to The Great Sperm Race on Channel Four recently, once the egg is released, the tantalising aroma of lily-of-the-valley wafts down the fallopian tube to lure the sperm closer. They catch one whiff of it and go crazy, battling for all their might to be the first one to penetrate that outer shell.

I find it deeply astonishing to think how we mimic this behaviour in our social lives. When all's said and done, we are nothing but reproduction.