The new meaning of brownie points

In the oven behind me, a tray of brownies was baking merrily away. Suddenly, there was a yelp of dismay from the general area of the oven. I turned round and was confronted with what appeared to be the victim of a Peruvian mudslide: a great dark-brown mound of steaming matter emitting a soft wailing noise.

Blinking out - the only spots of white in this pyramid of dark gunge - were two eyes I recognised, vaguely, as Alice's.

"Why, you're wearing the brownies, dear! What a novel look!" I did not say, as the half-cooked goo made its alluvial progress down her face and neck, over her bosom and her protruding tum. A brownie's worth sat perkily atop either slipper. A side-eruption had flowed over the work surface. Her oven-gloved hands still held the Pyrex brownie tray.

"That's one of the most muppety things I've ever done," she said.

It's dangerous when a girl says that, because the instinctive response - "No, no, dear. Of course it isn't. It's not even close" - is the wrong one.

"Ach. Anyone can fumble a baking dish," is the correct one.

"That's the thing," she said, still wagging her chocolatey head. "I didn't actually fumble it. I turned it upside-down deliberately, to check whether it was cooked on the bottom."

I'd heard people, in the past, talk about "preg-head". But I had yet to see it in action. My theory is that the placenta is too big and the brains have swapped.

* The other thing that I'd read about - and by gosh it's striking how in thrall we are to our biology - is "nesting". People don't really do that, do they? Oh boy, do they. They wake you up at 7am and say, earnestly, stuff like "Matchstick?" or "French Grey?" To which, men also being in thrall to biology, you find yourself saying: "Wuurrggggh whaddehelltimeisidd?"

Many of us, I'm sure, have had the experience of shopping for paint. Some will have had the experience of painting windows. But you don't know true domesticity until you have been window-shopping for paint.

* Boo to the critics: I'm still excited by the prospect of seeing Watchmen, Zack Snyder's film adaptation of Alan Moore's graphic novel. I met Snyder a bit ago, and asked him how he'd approached the character of Dr Manhattan: a bald, blue-skinned omnipotent space-cadet with trouble relating to human beings. "We did talk to Keanu [Reeves, right]," he said.