Cosy manuals on pregnancy and birth should come with a health warning. Alison Sparkes on the grizzly bits you're not prepared for

When I first realised I was pregnant, I waited about ten minutes before I got my first book. Stopping only to phone the father and chew all my colleagues’ rubber bands (I was at work when I did the test) I belted over to WH Smiths and grabbed the first pregnancy and birth bible I could find. They’re always called ‘bibles’. Probably because praying to, and cursing God, in equal measure, are going to be a big part of your life from now on.

I can’t entirely recommend this idea. During your first trimester (that’s the first three months, for those of you who haven’t got your birth and pregnancy bible yet) you may not be ready for some of this.

The book starts off promisingly enough; gentle pastel pictures of ladies in dungarees sporting discreet bumps, reclining in meadows with their partners massaging their shoulders. Like a timeshare salesman, it knows not to hit you with the full price until much, much later.

Then it’s the cross-section diagrams of a dissected woman in profile, gazing dreamily into space, as page by page her body swells and the baby grows inside. You read about cravings (if you haven’t already eaten that chapter) and then about morning sickness, feeling faint; the need to sit with your feet up a couple of times a day. You feel a bit special.

Then you get to the last quarter of the book. I was in Woolworths restaurant at this point, stuffing down a loaf’s worth of buttered toast in one go, having learned only half an hour ago that I was up the duff. I paused, mid-chew. Here the book sheds all pretence, soft focus and pastel diagrams. Instead it hits you head on with full colour, glossy photos of distended screaming women, fainting partners and grim-faced midwives.

Ironically, like the flipside of a top-shelf magazine (which is quite possibly what got you here in the first place) the book seems to glory in showing you as many birthing positions as possible. Women of all shapes and sizes, reclining, kneeling, squatting, but not one of them licking her lips or wearing stilettos.

I stumbled through these pages unprepared. As yet unbolstered by the level of hormone required to make sane women disregard all that pain nonsense. I shrieked aloud in Woolworths and couldn’t eat my last six bits of buttered toast.

With a shaky hand I put a bookmark in, just as it turned a little too realistic, and wrote on the bookmark NOT YET, YOU FOOL! I left it alone for a good month, by which time I was so awash with oestrogen-fuelled optimism that I took it all as seriously as a 1960s episode of Star Trek.

I really think publishers should put these helpful markers in for us. A colour coded page every so often, saying DO NOT READ AHEAD UNTIL YOU’RE AT 30 WEEKS. Or SIT DOWN AND EAT MORE CHOCOLATE BEFORE YOU TURN THIS PAGE.

Come to think of it, the whole last quarter bit could also be a very effective form of contraception for men. Instead of getting Readers Wives at the end of girlie mags, the government could insist on a Readers Wives Give Birth section. Condom sales would soar…