If I seem a little glum or downright hostile, you'll have to excuse my mood. I've got post-partum depression. My friends have had the babies and I've got the depression.

Admittedly, I've got the better half of the deal, but I can't help feeling cheated. I miss them, my friends. I want them back. Back to the way they were. Before the Babies came.

That's the way babies always seem to appear in your life, like alien invaders out of some sinister sci-fi flick: "The Babies. They're back! They crawled out of the darkness to take over your world."

They spread through your life like a virus, an epidemic. Suddenly, they're everywhere - you're surrounded - and your friends are never the same again.

I was twenty-eight before I even knew anyone who had a baby. People with babies were the sort of people my parents knew: They had nice, steady jobs and nice, steady relationships. They were upright citizens - no one I knew. My friends and I might have been getting older, but we weren't conformists. I was still young and vital. Now I understand that it was not knowing any babies that kept me that way.

While I was just figuring out how to look after myself, my friends were growing up. And when two of them had a baby, I'll admit it was nice for a while (nice for them). It was a novelty - a novelty act, practically. The pictures of the baby in the womb were really interesting (like the movie Eraserhead), though some other poses would have been nice.

Then another baby came along, and then another. It was as if all of my friends had entered a breeding competition. And as the babies arrived, my friends disappeared. In their places were people who looked much the same - except they now had huge bags under their eyes and had developed a strange preference for overalls and baggy tracksuits. Anything that was stain resistant would do.

Their behaviour had changed too. The party girls all turned into Mother Teresa. They gave up partying, they gave up alcohol, and they even gave up coffee. They threw a fit every time a cigarette came within a two-kilometre radius. And the guys who used up all night drinking Tiger beer and watching Nightmare on Elm Street 4 videos started making me watch videos of the birth. (Talk about a horror film...)

The basic problem with your friends having a baby is that they assume you're going to be just as enraptured by the experience as they are. Your friends behave as if getting pregnant was some sort of feat in itself, even though anyone can do it (fifteen year old girls at my school used to pull it off all the time), and most of them seem to manage it without trying - by accident, in fact.

But for the expectant couple, this is no accident. This is the miracle of life. And it is all encompassing. They no longer have the energy to go out to movies or the pub. They're too worn out to even contemplate even having sex again. They don't have time to read the papers. Forget going to DXO or the The 1NiteStand - from now on, feeling the baby kicking is their only form of entertainment.

As things progress, here's what you have to look forward to; endless updates on "when the baby's due," followed by innumerable reports on the prenatal clinics they've been attending, interminable descriptions of their route to the hospital, and how rude Singaporean doctors are, and detailed bulletins on the mother's health.

Morning sickness becomes an absolutely fascinating topic of discussion. You've never really talked about your friends' wives' digestion before, but suddenly you're making up for lost time. And once the little bundle of joy appears, settle in for a never-ending debate on which of the two parents she most resembles and what he might do when he grows up. (Stop crying, hopefully.)

Now that the baby is born, your Friends With babies (FWBs) go downhill at quite an alarming rate. The previous nine months begin to look like heaven. At least then, everything took place without the cacophony of bawling and screaming that annihilates the atmosphere wherever your friends will go from now on.

Which hopefully won't be around your house too often. FWBs leave behind them an area of total devastation; stains and pieces of food everywhere, broken possessions, ruined paintwork, not to mention the smell of shit, spit, sick and milk merging fragrantly with the baby food they always bring with them (for the baby to grind into your carpet, of course.)

For some reason, your FWBs begin to regress into babies themselves. Ask them what they think about the casino debate or the bombings in London and "Who's a oochi-koochi-woochi-woo?" is invariably the answer. Every time you turn around, one of your friends will be crawling around the floor, pretending to be an elephant or making airplane noises.

Whatever the baby does, your FWBs will point to it as evidence that their baby is prematurely intelligent. If the baby burps or giggles, you'd think Victor Khoo himself were in the room, such are the howls of laughter that follow.

One FWB told me that when his baby started breaking the cord on my telephone, he was actually identifying it with the umbilical cord. Your FWBs are entranced by the baby's every movement, every folding and unfolding of the little fingers, as if E.T. had descending and was doing card tricks.

"Ahhhhhh!" you FWBs swoon, looking over at you, melting with wonderment. "Look, he waved!"

Yeah, I think to myself, but he doesn't know he did. Everyone else seems to see a little angel, but all I see is a vindictive little old man with a shrunken head, no hair, who's speaking in tongues and raising havoc.

Now I'll admit I was never big on babies (you've probably noticed), so at first I thought it must just be me. I completely failed to realise that when a baby picks up a red building-block and gurgles "Yagalagal," what he is actually saying is, "You know, Joe, when I grow up I think architecture could be the right direction for me."

Amazing, really.

Soon comes the horrible, inevitable moment when your friends turn to you glowingly and - as if they're bestowing some sort of holy gift upon you - ask, "Do you want to hold her?" No, not really. Or, Do you want to change his diaper?" No fucking way.

Shortly after this, the pressure to become one of them starts mounting. It starts with being asked to see their baby again. They don't even pretend that anyone would come over to see them anymore. "He'll have grown and left school before you see him next," one FWB moaned to me recently. "He's eight months old!" I pointed out. "He won't even know I'm there!"

Everyone knows about the peer pressure that goes with drug taking, cigarette smoking and teenage activities like joyriding, but no one ever talks about the Communist-cadre-like intimidation of FWBs. If I could see my friends just once without them smiling at my girlfriend and saying "Your turn next...)

The thing is, I simply don't want to have babies. I'm still getting used to not being a kid anymore myself, and life's difficult enough without having to teach someone else about it. I don't know anything, and besides, I don't get enough attention as it is.

Plus, I don't know if I can afford a baby, what with all the presents I'm buying for my friends' babies in my futile attempt to make up for my own lack of parental instincts. (Is everyone else born knowing the words to "Toora, Loora, Loora"?) I get them all the things I wish someone had bought me when I was a kid; the boxed set of Scarface DVDs, a collection of vintage Absolut miniatures, Coldplay's back catalog.

I suppose I would have a baby if it meant getting my friends back. None of them are interested in me anymore - in my work, in my love life, my life. And I know there's only one way to recapture their attention. I've already shaved my head and started giggling.

All I've got to do now is get the hang of "Yagalagagal."