My cousin and his partner are over and they have accessorized into kids, two of them. They are both at the Adorable stage. The eldest is about three or four and has just discovered dinosaurs, so my legs are saturated in kiddy-sputum. Rarrr, I'm a T-Rex. And a little monkey who likes being tossed upside down and bounced on a big yellow ball and covered in blankets and tickled and sat on my knee and read to. I want him as my own. I'm not ashamed to admit that it makes me enormously clucky.

In fact, I'm planning a cunning abduction, complete with forged note in kiddy writing - "Mum an DAd I'M LeaVing HoME. B.ye" - and a sheet twisted into an escape rope. They can have him back when he changes into a pimpled conduit for hormones in ten years time. Till then, he's mine. MINE. MIIINNE.

Every time I encounter my Perth-dwelling batch of second cousins (I've got at least ten), I melt. I crave them. I know it is just a cunning biological scheme designed to propagate our species, but the fact that it's an evolutionary plot doesn't make it less magical. Side note: Love is just the same. You get an enormous gush of joy and hysteria in the introductory phases, followed by a settling, a normalising, until one day you wake up and realise that your passion has transmuted into comfort and you've got two kids and a stranger in your house and by that time it's too late for anything other than an affair. It makes perverse sense - if you're googywoogying and honeypieing throughout marriage, it will be less stable for your offspring, cos you'll spend less time on them. Nature always settles back into a comfort, a moderation, once the ploy of love-chemicals has worked. I resent that. I really do. Well, I would, if it wasn't so addictive.

One amazing thing about kids is what they do to previously 'cool' people. My cousin's partner is pretty hip, but her funky worldliness has managed to translate to bravery in the face of saliva and poo, which is pretty impressive.