In the beginning, there was the one night stand ...

Just before my 40th birthday, I went drinking with my friends to the 'mad beer' pub. I won't tell you where it is but suffice to say that the particular brand of German lager they have on tap there has led to fights, pregnancies and unimagined couplings among my friends who are a middle class North London group of people who are not generally inclined to Jeremy Kyle-worthy behaviour. But there is something about that beer. I fell victim that evening - not to the fights but to the last two transgressions. I ended up sleeping with a friend of a friend who told me the next morning that he lived with his long term girlfriend. Typical I thought as I said goodbye but a few weeks' later, I knew I was pregnant. I don't know how, I just did. And when I did a pregnancy test, it was confirmed. How the bloody hell had I managed to get pregnant after one shag when I was 39 and 363 days?? It's supposed to take months to get pregnant at that age - not one random shag without contraception!

My feelings were all over the shop. On the one hand, I was delighted - I was fertile! On the other - the bloke was clearly a twat and not someone who looked like they were going to be brilliant dad material. On another hand (I'm channelling Ganesh here), I was thinking there is no way I can do this on my own. On another, why not?

But my overriding feeling was that this conception was a bloody miracle. I'd managed to get pregnant after one night with a man when I had no idea where I was in my cycle. Friends had tried for months and months to conceive with carefully planned sex and here I was, several years' older, duffed up without even trying. I felt like a fertility goddess and it seemed utterly wrong to seriously contemplate having a termination. I'd been wanting to be a mother for years but was never with the right man at the right time.

I floated through the the first few weeks in a daze, not telling anyone, trying to get some actual decisions together before I did because I knew there'd be a barrage of questions and I didn't have any answers. I was adamant I was going to keep the baby though because how could I not? It had been conceived against all the odds - it was the runt of the litter probability-wise and I was the only person who could nurture it further. I've always been a sucker for a hard luck story.