Whose interest does egg freezing serve? The woman's or that of an ambitious, still pretty unforgiving culture that doesn't really ever see childbearing for female employees as convenient?

Later on Lady Maccon was to describe that particular day as the worst of her life. She had neither the soul nor the romanticism to consider childbirth magical or emotionally transporting. So far as she could gather it mostly involved pain indignity and mess. There was nothing engaging or appealing about the process. And as she told her husband firmly she intended never to go through it again.

Football is a fertility festival. Eleven sperm trying to get into the egg. I feel sorry for the goalkeeper.

She wore red lipstick the next time that I saw her, though her hair was more voluminous with dirt than before. Owing, like everything else about these girls, to the fertility of rats.

'Ex ovo omnia.' Everything from an egg.

Childbirth, as a strictly physical phenomenon, is comparable to driving a United Parcel truck through an inner tube.