A late shift to labour

And now, it gives me intense personal pleasure to announce the winners of the National Euphemisms for Masturbation Awards 2003.

Honourable mentions go to " meeting Mrs Palmer and her five daughters"; "bringing Mr Weasel back from the dead" and "bleeding the lizard", while the prize for best religious entry is shared between "Onan's Olympics", "boxing the Jesuit" and "disobeying the Pope". Judges were also impressed by "playing a solo on the meat whistle"; "choking the chicken"; "arm aerobics" and "teaching Yul Brynner some respect", and they gave a special cyber-award to " downloading from your own website".

And now for the five finalists, which I shall announce in reverse order: "dating Palm-ela Handerson"; "launching the tadpoles"; "evicting the testicular squatters"; "warming up the altar boy's dinner", and the overall winner (which will be awarded a pair of overalls), "making the bald man puke".

There's no great shame in admitting to masturbation nowadays (why should there be, when it's sex with someone you love?), especially when you're told to do it by a doctor. That's what happened on Britain's Oldest Mums (BBC1) last night to Michael, a person of scalp who was required to make his bald man puke in an IVF clinic, so that his 56-yearold partner Sandra Henderson could become pregnant.

Nine months later, I fully expected to see the bald man puke again, because Mike looked decidedly queasy throughout the birth, which was messy and difficult, with protracted contractions, followed by a long and painful delivery. And that was odd, because you'd think at Sandra's age that babies would just fall out on their own, in accordance with Newton's Theory of Gravity, and that sex would be rather like sticking a party sausage into a dustbin.

Lest you think that I'm being insensitive about the couple's desire to produce a child more than a decade after the menopause, let me assure you that my remarks are trifling, compared to the onslaught unleashed by Sandra's family.

"I think it's extremely selfish," declared her extremely selfish thirtysomething daughter Lisa ( Sandra had previously given birth to two children, back in the 1960s), while her apoplectic Aunty Gwen insisted that she'd been " gobsmacked" by the news, that the pregnancy was against nature, and that Michael was a thoroughly unsuitable father.

The only words of humane encouragement came from Professor Ian Craft at the London Gynaecology and Fertility Centre, who offered IVF treatment to older women because "the NHS will treat women until they're 37, then they've had it".

His was a lone voice of reason, and the man was a bit of a mensch, dealing sensitively with Sandra when she suffered some minor internal bleeding, although with the treatment costing £17,000 a time (and failing first time round), it was the couple's bank accounts that were suffering the most serious haemorrhaging.

Although the documentary presented the couple in a sympathetic light, nothing could disguise the oddity of their union. They had met at a Spiritualist church (so the warning light on the loony-o-meter was flashing red from the outset), and Michael's body language was speaking fluent panic from the moment the pregnancy was confirmed, so it was no surprise when he first suggested an abortion, then a separation. Meanwhile, the hormone tablets taken by postmenopausal Sandra were causing massive mood swings, leading Michael to retreat even further into his shell, yet somehow the couple eventually got back together again, and were married just in time for the arrival into this world of yet another miniature version of Winston Churchill, another small, loud person who won't pay rent for the next 18 years.