We have been looking after a baby blackbird this week.

Him indoors rescued one that was flapping about the lawn, having escaped the cat's jaws.

It didn't seem to be too injured, although it couldn't fly, and he thought it would be a shame to leave it to the mercy of the local feline population, of which our two are the worst predators.

The blackbird's mother was flying around in a panic trying to encourage her baby to fly away, not realising he couldn't.

Bob, as the baby blackbird has become known, was put in the large birdcage and hung off the shed roof for recovery and recuperation.

Apparently, or so we found out on the internet, mummy blackbirds continue to feed their babies for some weeks after they have left the nest, and Bob's mum has continued to minister to his every need, bringing him worms every five minutes and dropping them through the bars of the cage into Bob's eager and ever-open mouth.

We are hoping that we will thwart nature and that he will survive and recover enough to fly away. His mother's devotion is quite touching really, although it is probably genetically inbred.

We decided Bob was a Bob rather than a Roberta because of his continued need for his mother's attention.

If he was a girl we reckoned he would be insisting on his right to independence and arguing about how he could cope just fine on his own thank you.

An old friend, who has two sons, came to dinner last week and during our conversation we talked about whether it was easier to have sons or daughters.

We agreed that when they were babies it didn't really matter apart from the need to dodge sideways when changing boys' nappies.

At pre-school age, caring for them is similar, requiring the ability to make endless spaghetti and fish fingers while watching endless repeats of Thomas the Tank Engine and Bob the Builder or the Tweenies and Teletubbbies.

It's only once they start school that things start to get more complicated.

Girls start dressing up and constantly need you to intervene in arguments with friends with whom they are always falling out, whereas boys are usually happy as long as they've got a friend to play with. The differences seem to get bigger as they enter the teenage years.

Our friend reckoned girls are more entertaining and that at least you can have a conversation with them.

"For instance," he said, "Look at your video collection, there's Titanic and Romeo And Juliet, as well as comedies, all I've got in mine is every film Arnold Schwarzenegger has ever made, plus all my boys ever want to do is fight."

I must admit our fights with daughter are more of the verbal kind. If she was a baby blackbird she would probably be demanding only a particular type of worm because "brown worms are so not cool this week, mother", and insisting she was quite capable of looking after herself.

Bob, on the other hand, seems pathetically grateful for his mother's continued attention, so he must be a boy.