A breed apart

The Last Straw: There was an intriguing dispatch this week from Britney Spears's compound, which, in different circumstances, would surely have colonised both headlines and airwaves.

"I no longer study Kaballah (sic), my baby is my religion," the Louisiana song thrush told visitors to her website. After noting that Britney seemed unable to spell the faith/philosophy/ standing-order to which she had dedicated the last few years of her life, most commentators went on to conclude that the singer's abandonment of the Kabbalah for Babyism was, on balance, a good thing.

I'm not so sure. It is certainly true that few of the celebrities who follow the teachings of the Kabbalah Centre have got any more interesting since they began wearing a piece of red string on their wrists. Madonna, Paris Hilton and Ashton Kutcher, all adherents of this reworking of certain Jewish mystical beliefs, are about as likely to say something dazzlingly perspicacious now as they ever were. But by associating the care and maintenance of a new child with a cultish religion, Britney, until now underappreciated as a sociological commentator, draws our attention to the quasi-psychotic, evangelistic fervour that so often overcomes new parents.

It is not enough for recent reproducers to wheel their stinking midgets into restaurants so their hollering can disturb the dinners of those prudent enough to have kept their chromosomes to themselves. They are not content arranging their perambulators in such a way that the properly busy can never stride uninhibited down an escalator or make their way easily to the back of a bus. Allowing their mewling cubs to dribble mashed fruit down their chins all the way from Dublin to Lanzarote is not the extent of their tyranny. No. Like all cult members, they will insist on trying to insinuate others into their sinister legion.

Here they come. They have deep bags under their eyes. A faint scent of vomit hangs about their clothing. They haven't been to the cinema or read a book in months. And yet they have the nerve to adopt a pitying aspect when assessing my world.

"You have no idea how much richer our lives have become since Griselda arrived," they say, before collapsing into a deep coma on my almost entirely urine-free carpet.

New parents simply cannot accept that a human being might be content drinking cheap white wine until the small hours while discussing plot points from early Dr Who with like-minded folk on the internet. They maintain that the freedom to sleep until Bláthnaid and Anna appear on screen must carry with it an unshakeable concomitant melancholy. "You won't realise how unfulfilled you actually were until you replace that undetected emptiness with a little package of gurgling joy," they intone manically. "Everything changes when you help create a new family." The dead look in their hollow eyes suggests they may be talking about the Manson Family.

It's all pretence, of course. When members of the Church of the Frequently Spewed Upon press their noses to the windows of the childless and see happy drunkards casually decanting weed-killer into Fanta bottles and allowing carving knives to lie unsheathed on work surfaces, they find themselves faced with a conundrum. If the breeders admit that somebody who sleeps 10 hours a night and spends all his or her disposable income on delicious consumer goods can be profoundly happy then their own sacrifices suddenly seem that bit less worthwhile. Far better to make-believe that these lazy fools with their unstained playthings are futilely trying to force X-Box-shaped consolations into baby-shaped holes.

There are, however, worse things than the Babyists' proselytising tendencies. The more fanatical members of the sect - Grand High Wizards of the Pamper - often dare to argue that parents are gifted a keen moral compass denied to the childless. The formulation of words is consistent. After listening patiently to their lay friends' musings on some troubling issue of the day, the Wizards will shake their heads sadly. "Ah. But you think differently about these things when you have children," they say. We, it is implied, care that little bit less for the murdered, depressed and starving.

Any attempt to raise these objections with cult members is always met with the same response: you will eventually spawn, and you will think as we do. The child-rearing experience may look wearying from the outside, Britney might add, but when it happens (and it will) you will adapt better than you might expect. I'm sure I would adapt to losing an anatomical extremity. But I've no intention of sawing my arm off any time soon.