My chest sports two deflated balloons, courtesy of my nursing, nursing, nursing baby who has baby man-’flu.

The baby gets the cold first and then the rest of the household follows. This must surely be the worst bit of having a household full of men: when they get a cold, they are all practically dying and I am the only one who doesn’t fall apart.

The baby is pretty miserable: it’s the first real cold he’s had and it’s hit him pretty hard. The rest of them, I don’t feel so sorry for, not when I have the same cold myself and I’m still working, looking after them all as they lounge around on the sofa in varying degrees of assumed poorliness.

It’s not that I have no sympathy, it’s just that I have, well, no sympathy. But I’ll make them all hot drinks, replenish boxes of tissues, tuck them up on sofas under duvets, because then, next week, I will go shopping – perhaps all day – without any of them and when they complain, I will remind them of this week.