Once Jacob and Clare arrived in our lives, we soon found that lots of people had lots of opinions about the best way to look after twins. This is understandable because there are more and more twins around. The incidence of twins in western countries has almost doubled since 1980 and now accounts for about one in eighty births. This can be attributed to more than IVF; it’s also related to the fact that mothers are older these days, and even without medical intervention, an older woman is more likely to release two eggs in one cycle. I gather this is what happened to us. (Not that Jenny was old. I never said that. Let the record show that she wasn’t old then and she never will be.)

In the months leading up to Jacob and Clare’s birth, I read everything I could find. I was convinced that having twins wasn’t going to be so difficult after all. We traveled to the nearest big city to buy a pram and chose a serious piece of equipment that had been designed to the millimeter to fit through most doors, so long as you remembered to keep your knuckles out of the way. The woman who served us had been selling prams from the same store for over twenty years and had customers coming back whose mothers had dealt with her in the past. The expectant grandmothers stood to one side and listened while their daughters asked all the questions they had asked a generation before, thinking they were the first person to ever ask them. The woman said that when she started, a twins’ pram required a special order. Now she had four or five right there in the shop for us to choose from, a tribute to the increasing prevalence of twins as well as to the fact that people who have families later, even if they don’t have twins, may well have two children in a period of twelve months and they will need to be wheeled around together.

“Why this one?” I asked about the model she had selected for us. There were others with cup holders and even one with a facility for an MP3 player so that the babies could listen to Baby Einstein or Baby Mozart or something else that might give them an edge in life. I wondered why the woman wasn’t recommending one of these funkier versions.

“I get lots of feedback,” she said, “and the babies sleep best in this one.”

We had the credit card out of its holster before she needed to get to any other reasons.

We spoke to friends who had twins. They said the first six months would be unforgettable.

“Why?” we asked.

“Because you’ll be so exhausted, you won’t be able to remember a thing about them,” they told us.

But it wasn’t just the first six months. It was the first twelve months, a strange time that we longed to get through and at the same time wished would last forever. We wanted these two little bundles to grow up fast so that they could help themselves and let us get some sleep; at the same time, we hated the thought that they would ever change and stop needing us. It was a time of vulnerability for all concerned.

Whenever we were out, people who had twins approached us from all directions, wanting to remember when their own were little. We met parents whose twins were three, seven, fourteen, sixteen, twenty-four—you name it.

“My twins are fifty-five,” said one woman. “I’ve been looking at yours and thinking back. It’s a beautiful memory. The time you have now is so precious. Don’t worry. Life will get easier. But it won’t get any better.”

On another occasion, Jenny was struggling to get three kids out of the car and into two prams. A woman came along and put money in the parking meter for her.

“I had twins, too,” said the woman, her kindness like the touch of a feather. She vanished before Jenny could burst into tears.

In addition to the shows of support we experienced when out and about, we recieived more than our fair share of unsolicited advice. In my early expeditions with Jacob and Clare, for example, I was told that they should be wearing hats. I would normally have agreed heartily with this suggestion except for the fact we were inside when it was made. A woman loomed up at me out of the dog food aisle. She had read something about the effect of fluorescent light on babies and was concerned.

“Cotton hats are fine,” she said. “Just plain cotton will do.”

Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, she delivered her message and vanished.

This was so odd that I had to ring Jenny and let her know. While I was on the phone, another person interrupted to tell me that it was dangerous to talk on a mobile while pushing a shopping cart and that kids required my full attention, and if I wasn’t prepared to give it, then why did I have them in the first place.

“Technically, it was my wife who had them,” I replied, passing the buck as usual.

Another time, a woman noticed I was wiping their noses with an upward motion instead of a downward motion. She was concerned that I was pushing germs back up their noses and felt it incumbent upon her to let me know. Another time, a man came up behind me as I was putting the kids in the car because he thought I wasn’t fitting their restraints correctly. On a different occasion, I was sitting in a coffee shop and gave Clare— then almost nine months old–some of the froth off the top of my cappuccino, the part with a bit of chocolate sprinkled on it, as a small treat. But I chose the wrong moment. The woman at the next table went into action. Did I have any idea what caffeine could do to a child that age? Was I so stupid that I thought the froth on top was free of caffeine? Did I have any appreciation of what caffeine could do to the cognitive development of a child? Did I realize that sleep deprivation was an officially recognized form of torture? I should have said that I was the one being deprived of sleep, but I was simply too tired to come up with the retort at the time and only thought of it at a quarter to twelve at night when it was too late.

The one piece of advice we heard over and over was to never sleep in the same bed as the kids. And I can promise that we did what they said. We may have been in the same bed but we never slept a wink.