“Well, that wasn’t very magical,” says my wife.

She’s right. It really wasn’t. I’m not sure what we’d been expecting, but I distinctly remember being promised magic. Everyone we’d spoken to had said the 20-week scan was going to be an amazing experience. By now our baby would look like a baby, and not like the weird grey jellybean it looked like at three months. We’d get to say hi. We’d connect with it. We’d see it wriggling around doing cool stuff, like sucking its thumb and kicking it legs; maybe some shadow puppetry against the uterus wall. It was going to be awesome. It was going to be magical.

It was going to be no such thing.

We’d arrived at the clinic in good time so I let my wife chat to the receptionist while I wandered around the waiting room looking at all the safe sex posters tacked to the walls. “Now they tell me,” I thought to myself. Eventually the receptionist directed us up to the second floor, where we were told to wait for an ultrasound doctor. And so we waited. And waited. And waited some more. At this rate, they wouldn’t need an ultrasound machine to check on the child’s development. They could just ask its sixth form teacher.

Some time after the ice caps melted and just before President Bieber declared war on the Netherlands, a flustered looking doctor stuck her head into the room and asked if we were here for a scan.

“Yes,” we smiled in unison.

“You’re late” she replied a little too crossly. “And you’re supposed to be on the first floor.”

We were then hurried downstairs to the ultrasound room, where my wife was ordered onto the table without so much as a beg your pardon. We only had five minutes before her next appointment. Granted, this was entirely our fault, we’d gone to the wrong floor. But I thought there was some sort of international code that states you have to be nice to pregnant people. Even if they do something really mean and horrible to you first. Like make you watch Masterchef. Or walk really slowly. Or take up too much space in bed. Or accidentally wait on the wrong floor.

Stylist's Male Columnist