Alison has promised that Plokta will report the story of Pod in gory detail, but this only tells things from the mother's perspective. Clearly, this is the most important, and you would probably be much less interested in my whinging about the loneliness of the long distance beer drinker when their favourite partner in alcohol switches mostly to fizzy drinks and breakfast milk. Or the trials of doing all the housework, shopping and cooking, not that this is much of a novelty when you live with Alison.

I thought I could at least help by naming the baby, but Alison was suspicious of my suggestions because she knows that giving out dodgy names does happen in my family. For the time being we've settled on Pod, but we'll definitely choose something sensible later. Probably before Pod leaves school.

Meanwhile, Alison was quite understandably concerned that she was feeling very unwell, and perhaps there might be two babies. This is too serious a subject to joke about, so I thought it best to raise the stakes and go for something a little more improbable -- quins. When Alison mentioned baby names, I would suggest that Podkin was a good name, that her sister could be called Podina, their smaller brother could be Podney, the Paula Yates lookalike could be Poddles Tinkerbell Wombat, and the Greek oil tycoon would be Podolopoulous. And wasn't it clever for them all to fit inside Alison?

There was some harumphings from Alison, and comments that twins would be financially inconvenient, that the state is a bit more helpful if you have triplets, and that quads and quins allow you to make a bit of money from publicity to offset running expenses.

Inevitably, inflation set in. I could not resist hypothesising sextuplets, septuplets and octuplets. Would it be the Magnificent Seven or the Ten Little Indians? I had got up to dodecaplets by the time Mandy Allwood decided to turn bearing octuplets into a nice little earner. Twelve Monkeys, that's not too many...

And in that case, we'd need some more names. Podula, and mad bishop Podo, and Podsey, and we didn't get to twelve before I thought of Podzilla. When Alison asked me what gender PZ was, I immediately answered "man-eating upright lizard". And a bit of a problem child too. Many babies bite their parents' guests, but Podzilla was fighting King Kong and going off to destroy Tokyo. Not to mention eating his siblings. You notice that we only thought of nine names -- three were gone already and he was starting on the others. Alison remarked that if it did turn out to be a man-eating upright lizard, she might reconsider her decision to breastfeed. We mentioned this to the midwife, who told us not to be silly, and everything would be all right. And then Alison went for her 20 week scan, the results of which are below:

Tomorrow Tokyo...

-- Steven Cain