We've just converted our house into an adult play zone. The lounge is arranged around some top-notch audio-visual gear and lovingly alphabeticised CD's and DVD's; the kitchen is all black marble and slick chrome; the second bedroom will soon be a gym and the box room is an office. There are no scuffed edges or jammy fingerprints anywhere. None of these uses is wholly new, but the emphasis has changed with our acceptance that we're not likely to have kids.

Having recently spent an unhealthy amount of time alone at home on our pleasant suburban estate, I've come to set my watch by other people's parental duties. The children toddling to school with their designated parents mark the hours as reliably as the cymbal-slapping automata housed in the Trumpton clock. The same parents mark dawn and dusk by dragging the 10-stone curs that had once been such irresistible puppies to the local mud-pit for their twice-daily bowel movements. If I ever lose my marbles completely and retreat to my Fairtrade Synthetic-Ivory Tower, I'm going to make an orrery which incorporates suburban routine into the movements of the spheres.

We're set apart from all of this by not having any chicks to house in our overpriced and under-built starter nest. Were this estate a properly run hatchery, we'd soon find ourselves dismembered, coated in a unique blend of herbs and spices and deep-fried.

Biologically speaking, we're just a pair of broilers. Like the middle-class, almost middle-aged stereotypes we are, our ambitions were at odds with biology. Having spent a large chunk of our adult lives looking for the right career, partner, house, carpet material and eBay rating, we finally fixed on the idea of babies. Mother Nature would rather we'd done our duty at the age of about 15, having failed to notice that these days only disaffected ne'er-do-wells spawn at that kind of age. Evolution is lagging way behind cultural fashion.

Mine is a wholly splenetic argument rooted only in cynicism. While we were dabbling with increasingly futile fertility treatment, my work brought me into daily contact with feckless, drug-addicted, hopeless and uncaring scum who were blessed with more offspring than they knew or cared what to do with. Of course, these individuals had often been doomed by their own parents' antics, but did that entitle them to perpetuate those mistakes like malevolent babushka dolls?

I came to believe that fertility rose in direct proportion to idiocy. While there is certainly an element of self-pity in this assessment, I also feel huge pity for the poor little blighters destined to repeat their parents' appalling lifestyles ad infinitum. Not that the word 'parent' is always used; I shuddered every time I heard that delightful fin-de-siècle coinage, 'baby-farva'.

The right to family life as enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights is not a notion I can airily accept. Are we really saying that the worst our society has to offer should reproduce freely? That people not fit to own pets should be allowed to create, abuse and corrupt children?

Perhaps there's a thin line between craven moral relativism and eugenics, but I’m still tempted to think we should all be sterilised young and only reactivated if we can pass an exam. However, as the antics of the Nazis and the Norwegian Welfare State system demonstrate, such ideas in practice lead to unspeakable acts of irrational prejudice as long as they're administered by the kind of nasty human specimens who should be their own first candidates.

Not that I’m entitled to feel too superior. If I cared enough, I’d act on my belief that nurture is more important than nature, that children shouldn’t be doomed by accidents of birth, and I’d adopt. The truth is I’m just another messenger for the onward transmission of my DNA, and I’m miserable at a visceral level because I can’t get my message through.

Perhaps I’m just indulging my own resentment because it makes me feel a whole lot better about my DINKY lifestyle. The coffee in the British Airways World Traveller Plus lounge might be bitter, but as long as I bear in mind that I’m not changing nappies or wrangling with teenagers, I shouldn’t be.