When I was at medical school the obstetrics professor used to tell us there was no right time to get pregnant because something else always came up in a couple’s professional or domestic life.

But in many other ways there’s no wrong time to have a baby. The ideal of course is that you want to have a baby and that you’ve planned for it.

These days, of course, we enjoy a lot of control over our fertility. So it does give us more time to think about having a baby.

However satisfying your career or important your job may be, whatever prowess you have achieved in sport or leisure activities or in voluntary work, the sense of achievement in bringing up a happy child is unparalleled.