Wednesday 24 August

After entire day spent compulsively Googling peri-menopause, journey with Jude and Shaz to purchase late-night pregnancy test was longest of my life. Felt eerily portentous: my fate as a tragic barren spinster - so long merely quasi-dreaded as a semi-jokey paranoia - was about become all-too-real reality.

The sense of existential agony in the minicab was almost palpable. None of us could speak or look at each other. Eventually, however, I realised this was because Jude and Shaz were both applying lip-gloss.

"What are you doing?" I burst out. "You both look like Nancy Dell'Olio. Are you hoping to pick someone up in the pigging chemist?"

"Sorry, Bridge," giggled Shaz. "It's just..."

"Times may change, but standards must remain!" slurred Jude brightly. "Oops!"

Stared furiously out of the window to realise that we were driving past the white stucco-fronted house where Mark Darcy had first told me he cared: "I find myself liking you very much, just as you are." Struggling with wobbling lower lip, I looked up again bravely, straight at the tree against which Daniel had tried to shag me after the Pergamon Press Christmas party and had thrown my Agent Provocateur Christmas knickers up into the branches. Was as if London was littered with gravestones marking the highlights of my fertile years.

"Look, Bridge," said Jude, glutinous lips glistening in the half light. "You've got to stop beating yourself up about this double shag. It's been a strange time for everyone."

It was true. Looking back, the heady interludes with Mark and Daniel seemed so symptomatic of the hope of early summer. First there was the heatwave, then Live 8, then the Olympics and suddenly after all the years of feeling grotty and ashamed (what with all the papers saying how crap everyone is all the time) it was our turn to shine and Britain was great and on top again. Then the very next day, with the front pages still showing cheering crowds and Union Jacks, we got bombed and now instead of feeling great we're bickering about cover-ups and re-obsessed with Sven and Nancy and I'm having a peri-menopause alone in a taxi with Jude and Shaz.

"No, Jude," Shaz said strictly. "The real point is - as Michael Buerk would tell her - sleeping with Mark and Daniel is irrelevant because they are irrelevant because they are men. Haven't I been telling you for years that men would soon merely be kept in kennels as pets? Now it's been confirmed by a top BBC war correspond... Stooooop! There's the pigging chemist."

Once back in flat, worst thing about weeing on stick business was it brought back all pregnancy tests had done in past - going back to late teens when getting pregnant was worst disaster imaginable and feared to be possible through light petting. Felt complete idiot that had let all those chances go by, month after month, worrying about completely unimportant details like what society would think, or not having quite the right partner, or any money, till suddenly it was too late.

"Well?" said Shazzer as I emerged clutching the stick.

"I don't know, do I?" I said huffily. "I've only just done it."

Give it to me," said Shazzer. Held pregnancy test out of her reach. There followed an unseemly scramble, culminating in Shazzer crashing down with Jude in a women's wrestling sex-sandwich manner: the stick tumbling gently on to the carpet. There were two square windows. The first contained a dark blue line. In the second, the one which usually comes up empty, something was starting, tremblingly to appear. "You can't..." began Shaz, just as I was thinking the same thing, "...be a little bit pregnant."

The little line was so faint it was almost imaginary, but was gradually growing clearer and more confident of its own existence. The three of us stared at the stick as if it had fallen to Earth from the skies, and was something holy and glowing from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

"What if she's pregnant with both of them," said Shaz in an awed whisper. "Like twins."

"No, you can't," said Jude, bossily.

"What do you mean?" said Shaz.

"Well the first sperm blocks the second. Or the dominant one blocks the non-dominant one or something."

"Well what about when someone has one white twin and one black twin?"

"That's different eggs but the same sperm..."

"That's just fucking stupid," snarled Shaz. "A woman can't have white fucking eggs and black fucking eggs."

This was not how I had imagined this moment would be. I thought I would be with square-jawed love of my life, bound to me in a Natasha Kaplinsky-type Babington House nuptial. I imagined him returning from work in a suit to the joyous news, taking me tenderly in his arms in the large but slightly tasteless farmhouse kitchen of a Hello-style renovated Elizabethan manor house in Kent. I did not imagine I would be in my flat with Jude and Shaz having an insane swearing row about black and white eggs while drunkenly chain-smoking.

"Why do you have to be so bombastic about everything?" Jude was growling. "What if she has a white father and a black mother? What does she get then?"

"Speckled eggs," cackled Shaz.

"Shut up, shut up," I burst out. A feeling was welling up inside me. After all the fuckwits, all the failed New Year's resolutions, all the Silk Cuts, chardonnay and hangovers, all the phone calls which never came, all the years of drifting rudderless and dysfunctional, thinking everybody knew how to do it better than me, and I was about to get it right tomorrow if only I could work out what it was: suddenly something magical and new had happened to me: it was a miracle.

"I'm..." I whispered, tears starting to trickle through my mascara as I reached for a celebratory Silk Cut, and Jude grabbed it out of my hand. "I'm going to have a baby."