I always seem to lag behind my friends when it comes to life milestones. Their graduations, promotions, property acquisitions, weddings and the like preceded mine by years. It’s like I missed some vital growing-up process during my stint living abroad. In the race of life, I stalled my engine on the starting grid and am being mercilessly lapped.

The recent trend is children. Half of my ex-classmates already have kids. One has three (and possibly no television set). Yet here I am – in my 30s, yet to be married, childless and still spending inordinate amounts of time laughing at cat pictures on the net.

Not terribly worried, mind you; Facebook photos may make it look like having kids is all smiles, cuddles and eating cake, but I’ve taken care of enough nieces and nephews and I’ve seen enough dark eye circles to know better. I suspect the cake is a lie.

I wonder how I would handle being told that my wife is expecting. Assuming I don’t keel over and die on the spot, I expect that joy and excitement will come, eventually. It had better, because as every man knows – kids: that is it. Game over. Your days of doing what you like, when you like, with just the wife to answer to are well and truly numbered. You’re going to be a dad! Yay! No sleep – ever! No Mercedes SLK – ever! No smoking – ever! Social life revolving around parents’ days and ballet lessons and duttrina! Responsibility!

The pregnancy. She can’t drive, can’t drink, can’t lift anything and can’t be allowed to get stressed out for nine months. Nine whole months of butlerdom, walking on eggshells around a roaring lioness. Do lionesses wake up at 2am demanding guana juice milkshakes and toffee popcorn, or have teary meltdowns because wildebeest are, “like, so cute”? No idea, but I hope not for the lion’s sake; good toffee popcorn is notoriously hard to come by on the African plains.

Everything I do during its formative years will have a butterfly effect far beyond my understanding

The long anticipated birth. The ladies will fuss and coo. Invariably, it will have “your nose and your wife’s eyes”. I know that all I will see, upon regaining consciousness, is a lumpy pink human with eyes and a mouth (for which read ’sound hole’).

Because sharing a home with a prowling lioness is not enough to atone for my sins, I will also have a shrieking pink demon demanding constant attention to contend with. I am told the trick is to stuff Mount Soundhole with milk as soon as it erupts.

I expect it will often barf on me, maybe soiling itself while doing so. I will swear that I just fed it milk and wonder where the green colour comes from. I will tell myself that my kid is already adding value to its organisation. So proud. Pass the gin.

I expect a nine-month-long dry spell, probably followed by four years of “not tonight, I’m knackered” and another 14 years of “not now, the kids will hear us” after that. If I have kids early enough, I hope to sneak in another handful of years of fun before the menopause kicks in, but I don’t know if we’d want to anymore. I’ve read about physical changes, “mostly reversible with time and exercise”, I’m told.

I am sure that Kegels and yoga are great – if you’re Madonna and have assistants and really want to crush walnuts with your pelvic floor muscles. I fear the rest of the mothers who have, you know, mothering stuff to do possibly won’t see remembering to squeeze and hold every five minutes as a priority. I digress.

That’s just infancy. The shrieking mettwurst will grow and break things and defy me constantly and need discipline. Humanity should tremble when people say they don’t want to be strict like their parents.

Your parents’ system obviously worked (I generalise) and whatever the new parenting fad is today, frankly, doesn’t. Yes you, brazenly pretending not to notice little Denzel, Sheniah and Laquesha bouncing around the restaurant like rocket-propelled banshees – you’re doing it wrong. Please do not reproduce again. No really, don’t. Just no.

Cards on table. In spite of this, I still want kids. I love them and I am the favourite uncle of at least one of my siblings’ progeny at any given time, so it’s possibly mutual.

The responsibility is the truly scary part. Not only will I have to fund, feed, cloth, medicate, educate and generally tame this wild creature, but most onerous of all, I will have to mould it.

Everything I do during its formative years will have a butterfly effect far beyond my understanding. Will I always put its interests first? Should I?

And, can it tell that I’m figuring it out as I go along?