Help your child be a super-pooper! We're potty about potties! Bum's the word!

Hurray, it's potty training time again, and my letterbox is positively a-flap with pamphlets, booklets, stickers and videos setting out the do-dos and don'ts of this tricky process.

I can only assume I must be on some poo-related database somewhere - a sort of Poo's Poo of potty training. Some wretched number-cruncher will have been busy dropping bacon sarnie crumbs in his keyboard last week when suddenly - kapow! - a red light started whirling on top of his computer, a klaxon started blaring and my name appeared in continuous, luminous type across his screen alongside the words "poo alert...poo alert...poo alert".

This may seem a little fanciful, but how else am I supposed to explain the sudden appearance on my doormat of mountains of potty advice from numerous, seemingly unrelated companies.

Each and every one of them appears to be trying to fool the populace into believing that potty training is fun. As if watching your child widdle (or worse) on the lino for the fifth time in as many hours is ever going to be a giggle, no matter how many zany star charts and 'hilarious' picture books you are presented with.

I have friends who have taken a week off work to teach their children the mystical art of peeing in a potty, and they have all returned as ghosts of their former selves. You see them muttering together in corners, their skin grey and baggy and their unbrushed hair matted with Playdoh. "I thought we had it cracked on Thursday," they whisper, "but then she had a Fruit Shoot and everything went to pot."

Not one of them, not even the painfully enthusiastic ones who actually enjoy making pasta necklaces, has ever said they had fun while embroiled in the seemingly endless potty training process. But they do it because it is something that simply has to be done.

What I don't understand, however, is why so many women (most men still have little to do with the explosive end of their children) are now choosing to do it so early.

Perhaps it is the competitive nature of modern parenting that is compelling otherwise sane(ish) women to plonk their kids on a potty within seconds of the midwife declaring "It's a boy... you can stop screaming and let go of your husband's testicles now". Or maybe it's just a fad.

Whatever the reason, wherever I go at the moment, whether it's to school, work or just to the Spar for a tube of Pringles (paprika) and a copy of Heat magazine (Which Celebrity Has The Wrinkliest Elbows - Special Edition), people ask me whether my daughter is potty-trained yet.

When I say no, they immediately launch into a list of tried and tested tips they are sure I will find invaluable but which I actually don't listen to. I usually glaze over after about 20 seconds and spend the next interminable minutes fiddling with a bit of ripped up tissue in my pocket while quietly humming The Smiths' Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now.

The thing is, you see, I have learned from painful experience that kids are not necessarily adept at sticking to a schedule. I might have been ready to start potty training when my son turned two, but he had other ideas. It didn't matter what I did - star charts, threats, bribes, pleading, hitting my head against the wall until I blacked out - he wasn't going to wee anywhere other than his nappy, the sofa, the garden or the cats' litter tray until he was good and ready.

I wasted six months of our lives chasing him around with a bright green Winnie the Pooh potty, screeching "Do you want a wee?" like a demented parrot with no respect for personal boundaries. Well, I'm not going to do that again.

My daughter knows where the potty is and she knows what it's for. You may poo-poo it, but that's my plan.

Updated: 11:39 Monday, July 25, 2005