I awoke this morning to the sound of the doorbell. Struggling to pull my jeans up over my protruding boner, I staggered into the hallway, flattened down the bulge and blearily opened the door. Standing on the front step was a young mother from the village with her two year-old daughter in tow. Had I been more cognizant, I would have flexed my abdominal muscles to bestow the woman with a mental picture off my ripped six-pack. That way, the next time she was enduring another soulless rutting from her boyfriend, she could recall my toned torso and beat him to orgasm for once. As it was, sex was the last thing on my mind, in spite of any indications my wayward boner might have been giving to the contrary. I soon learned that the mother had not turned up in order to fuel my Adonis complex but to deposit her daughter before going to work. For the rest of the day - or until my girlfriend woke up at least - the bairn would be my responsibility; the playing, the feeding, the toileting, the placating - the works. How had this come about? In just two weeks I had gone from zero dependants to having two toddlers to look after. Only a handful of marsupials (the American opossum, the rare water opossum and the eastern native cat of Australia) had a gestation period that short. What had I done to warrant a clutch of illegitimate brats in such a narrow interstice? I knew my tadpoles were virile, but this was beyond a joke. At this rate, I’d be a father-of-fifteen by the age of 30, pilloried in the press for receiving £30,000 a year in benefits. The next time I got laid - if my newly-acquired progeny would permit me a moment of peace in which to get laid - I vowed to double-bag and pull out early to be triply sure. It just wasn’t worth the risk of winding up with yet another kicking, screaming sprog. And yet, as I set about playing with the juvenile duo, the scariest thing of all was that I found myself actually enjoying being daddy. It was frightening to face up to, but beneath the drug-dealing, perjuring, lubricious, trash-talking exterior, there was a devoted father, only too happy to change dirty nappies and mollify toddler tantrums.
Later on, when my girlfriend had awoken and absolved me of my lone-parent duties, we put the bairns into their prams and took a walk through the village. As I trudged through the drizzling rain with my girlfriend, pushing our matching pink buggies, the bottom of each one filled with empties to take to the bottle bank, it dawned on me that to any onlookers we must have resembled the perfect dysfunctional ASBO family. Wine bottles? Check. Multiple children from different fathers? Check. Electronic tag? Check. The only thing we were missing was a pit-bull on a piece of string. Still, who knows what tomorrow might bring when the doorbell rings? The road to perdition is an insidious one. Long before I arrive in hell, I hope to nurture my girlfriend and miscellaneous dependants into The Family From Hell. That way, at least we have the spectacle of an ITV documentary to look forward to before our inevitable eviction and transfer downstairs to take up permanent residence with the patron saint of ASBO families - Auld Nick himself.