Avin' a geezer...

I was lucky enough to meet Ray Winstone a couple of months back, when he popped into my office to do a voiceover. As I had to speak to him regarding script, and was wearing a tight dress that day, he clearly felt obligated to mention my emergent unborn child: first by pointing knowingly, as if letting me know I was, in fact, knocked up; and then by asking if I'd found out the sex.

"Er no", I replied, going into my usual slight fluster when confronted by the prospect of conversation with a male celebrity, "I mean I can't decide which I think. Sometimes" I added, displaying spectacular stating of obviousness, "I think it's a boy...and sometimes a girl," (wisely refraining from mentioning that dream I had where it was a little of both, Jamie Lee Curtis stylee).

Ray nodded knowingly again, father of several to first time mum. "You're carryin' it all in front, init" he said sagely. "You're avin' a geezer".

Well, if Ray said it, it must be true, right? Instantly I was confronted with mental images of my son popping out, betting slip in hand, the only sound the crackling of his tracksuit as he stroked his pitbull and looked around for a burger. Not a comforting thought. The alternative, of course, was to doggedly assume the opposite of Mr Winstone's blithe assertion, but this simply meant avin' a bird - who would no doubt emerge St Tropez-fresh, smelling of biscuits and looking for her clip-in hair extensions. Way to get inordinately worried regarding issues of gender!

It is strange, though, how confidently people predict the sex of a baby based on the shape/size/position of the bump, and to be perfectly honest, over these last few months its rather got my farmyard animal. For a start, there's a 1 in 2 chance that every guess could prove to be the right one - who wouldn't fancy those odds - and for afters, we didn't find out the sex of our child for a reason - ie, we didn't want to know. Friends (and random folk on the street) have been scandalised to learn that we haven't performed the foolproof ring test (you know, the one where you hold a ring on a piece of twine/hair/intestine over the bump and determine the sex from the manner in which it rotates - yep, and then you can repeat the process and discover the sex of your dining table's child aswell), as if, should the NHS take this method on board, there would be no need for pesky peering at scans to look for something dangly, or not.

The other 'method' of telling me the sex of my baby tends to base itself on 'vibe' - as in, "I'm getting a boy vibe", and while I am not one to knock the powers of intuition, I am still sceptical regarding the effectiveness of this method - for example, a rather scuttered male friend, at a party (one of about 2 I've been to this summer, before I mislead you to think I've led a kicking preggers social life - kicking only in the literal sense, unfortunately), told me he got a strong girl vibe because "you're so feminine, I can't imagine anything male coming out". Flattering, yes - stupid, also yes. But there we go - everyone's an expert when it comes to babies, it seems, and if we had found out the sex, we'd have missed out on the speculating fun....because it is fun, in a faintly irritating way...and also, presumably, have a little less cream and beige in the baby's capsule wardrobe.