As a childless person, many feelings are aroused by Facebook’s annual floods of back-to-school photos but sadness is not one of them.

I am not entirely childfree by choice. Of the many madnesses I indulged in during lockdown, perhaps the greatest was restarting IVF fertility treatment I had begun and abandoned a few years before. Maybe it was the sudden unasked-for break in work to think about my life’s broader trajectory, maybe a broader existential terror provoked by an immediate global threat to human existence.

My partner and I masked-up and made the same pilgrimage as an increasing number of Australian families through pandemic silence from home to clinic, and I was dosed, scraped, checked and injected until my hopes soared in the sky and then came crashing down. And then came crashing down again. And again. Then I was too old for treatment. Then the futile treatment stopped. After the final failed round, yes, I did cry all the way home in the car.

To be fair, it’s hard to hold it together when you’re going through something so intimate and private and personal that simultaneously involves you being pantsless and splayed before a parade of clinicians for months of your life. Disappointment is also more brutal when it’s shared so completely with the person you most love. Add to this the........

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