Today, Matthew, I'm going to be...

... babysitting.

Himself's niece Saoirse is beside me at the table, sucking down a carton of Ribena and paring the hell out of any pencil that dares cross her field of vision. That's grand. I can handle the shavings, which are now so plentiful they could be used to line the hutch of a particularly large rabbit and he'd feel nothing but comfortable, and the fact that the pencils are used to draw on the table as much as on the paper, but at some stage I will have to change her nappy.

That, my friends, is not grand.

I have never changed a nappy in my life and sort of hoped I'd never have to do it. There's only two years between myself and my sister so I never had to do hers, and I used to pull disappearing acts that David Copperfield would have envied in my teenage years when cousins of nappy-wearing age started getting a bit whiffy. Himself gave me a crash-course the other evening and made it sound very easy, and Saoirse's mother changed her this morning before I picked her up, and I thought I'd be fine.

I am, after all, 28 years of age - a grown-up, by all accounts, and absolutely past it as far as my cousin Eddie is concerned - and regularly have to pick up after the dog.

However, I had to get her to blow her nose earlier when she complained about it hurting her and I nearly puked at what was expelled.

Doesn't really bode well for the nappy-changing, does it?