In an ideal world it should all go swimmingly to plan. But, when it came to it, Fiona Gibson abandoned all hope of planning her baby’s arrival.

My baby was due in three weeks. ‘Have you made a birth plan?’ enquired a friend. If I had made one, I wouldn’t have told her. Share your birth plan and you’re opening a catering-sized can of worms. ‘Of course, so-and-so did it naturally,’ my friend continued. ‘No drugs. Not even gas and air. And the baby popped out like a pea.’

This didn’t seem the ideal moment to confess that I fancied the idea of a whopping dose of diamorphine. Hell, it’s one of those rare occasions when it’s perfectly acceptable to take drugs, and you don’t have to find your own way home afterwards.

But naturally, no one knows precisely which drugs they will require during childbirth. That’s the bizarre thing about birth plans: even if it’s your 11th child, you cannot be certain whether the baby will make a speedy Bird’s Eye exit or require the assistance of forceps. Yet you’re somehow expected to plan for this. A friend of mine insisted: ‘I want the baby delivered onto my stomach.’ Yet, when it actually happened, she said she would have preferred the child to be cleaned up while she enjoyed a nice cup of tea.

Birth plans have their uses, of course. They force you to think about what’s to come. You can waddle along fantasising that your baby will emerge fully attired in fleecy garments from Gap; figuring out your birth plan forces you to acknowledge that the process may be a teeny bit messy.

First time around, I gleefully joined the birth plan club. ‘I shall use this,’ said a serene redhead at our NCT group, wafting a bottle of Bach Rescue Remedy. Another woman was adamant about the birth pool option, until she witnessed a video showing an awful lot of thrashing about and little in the way of relaxed floating.

When eight women from our antenatal group met up with their babies, not one had experienced a delivery that went according to plan. I’d been mildly put out about my Caesarean (but, as my twins were breach, it seemed silly to kick up a rumpus about it). A fellow new mother had been miffed that the birth pool had been occupied and, unreasonably, her baby hadn’t been prepared to wait his turn. ‘That’s just like the bathroom at our place,’ I sympathised. ‘My husband locks himself in there for an hour. God knows what he gets up to.’ Oddly, she wasn’t amused.

That’s the downside of birth plans: unless the process rattles along as detailed in your notes, you feel pretty cheated. Pauline, 33, had hoped for minimal medical intervention, ‘But I was given pessaries to get the contractions going. Soon they were coming thick and fast and the TENS machine I’d been intent on using (the thing that’s meant to stop the pain messages reaching your brain) just got on my nerves. At one point, I had a pad on my bum and one on my neck and I hadn’t even realised,’ she told me. Hours later, Pauline’s midwife suggested an epidural. ‘Absolutely nothing went according to plan,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter now, but for weeks after Chloe’s birth, I felt that I’d wimped out.’

Second time around, I didn’t make a plan, and just hoped that the baby would be delivered vaginally. The midwives were fantastic, and at no point did I feel that anything was being done to me without my permission. If I’d written a birth plan, it would have been sheer fantasy. As it was, apart from behaving in a more dignified manner instead of weeing all over the floor, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.

Not that I’m in a hurry to repeat the experience. In fact, to ensure that I don’t have to deal with this birth planning business in the near future, I’m directing my efforts towards family planning instead.