Two friends of mine are trying for a baby. Don’t worry, it’s all above board – they’re married to each other and everything. Anyway, they keep mentioning their grand new venture as if it were a DIY project, like applying for planning permission or having their back garden landscaped.

It is hard to know how to respond to this. I usually just smile and try to erase any unwholesome images from my brain by thinking of the recipe for pancake batter. Certainly I never bring it up in conversation, in a “how’s the whole ‘trying for a baby’ thing coming along?” kind of way. I am trying to bear in mind the following code of etiquette:

Inappropriate responses when people tell you they are trying for a baby
- “Ooh, I’ll lend you my copy of the Kama Sutra – though it’s a bit dog-eared, I’m afraid.”
- “Not pregnant yet, then?”
- “I’ll carry it for you for 10 grand.”
- “I’m sorry, but I think you are being highly irresponsible to bring a child into the world, when arguably the greatest threat to the planet’s ecosystem and indeed access to adequate food and clean water is gross overpopulation of the human species.”
- “Cool! Can I watch?”

Yes, it is very difficult.

Well, I hope that should they manage to become ensperminated, they will be a bit more loving than the eighteenth-century parents of Mittelfels, Bavaria, where I read this week that “farmers would rather lose a child than a calf”. Harsh. Still, if “calf” were substituted with “Martha Stewart Living magazine”, I think I would find it difficult to make the moral choice.

That quote comes from a ridiculously entertaining book called Population History and the Family. This contains all sorts of evidence that people in medieval times were a few chicken drumsticks short of a banquet. You know, a bit simple, like. I have every sympathy with a basic lack of infrastructure they had to put up with. For example, their wattle-and-daub hovels were so flimsy that “burglars pushed the walls down rather than enter through the doors”. Sort of ye olde ram and raide.

But I hardly think parents could have been surprised that infant mortality rates were on the high-ish side when they used to leave their babies in cradles stuffed with straw next to the fireplace, with candles left burning all night and pigs running in and out. This is not joined-up thinking, people. I mean, they might as well have put a firelighter in the baby’s mouth.

Children were in even more danger when they could walk. This was the age when they were at greatest risk of being stolen by elves, of course. Or of wandering off and drowning while left in the care of a blind woman, if you want to be more prosaic about it. When social services come round, always blame the elves.

The German bit comes from a thrilling chapter called “Bastardy in South Germany”, where an explosion of back-of-the-hay-bale shenanigans in the 1750s led to illegitimacy rates of one in five births. Girls were having children left, right, and, quite probably, centre. I imagine it was a sexual revolution on a par with the 1960s, only by the time Woodstock came around, the pill had replaced infanticide as the contraceptive du jour and Jimi Hendrix was finally getting to the end of the guitar solo in Voodoo Child.

To add a sombre note, over 50% of those illegitimate babies in Bavaria died in the first year of life. Dark times indeed. I must say, that in a world where children were barely expected to survive 12 months, you can’t blame famers for hardening their hearts and putting their faith in cows instead.