You know, Brad Pitt and Mark Wahlberg have a lot to answer for. I'd like to take them to court for crimes against 40-year-old single, childless women. For extreme mental cruelty. To be fair, they are only the best-looking examples, of which there are plenty. There is a veritable Hollywood club of A-list daddy totty. Give me a minute, I'll come up with some others.

Oh yeah. Matthew McConaghey. He of the endless chest. Pap shots of the actor holding his newborn is nothing short of a conspiracy of Athena poster-style proportion. If anything, since he became a father he's been wearing shirts even less than before. And don't get me started on Patrick Dempsey. McPerfection has recently bagged big daddy totty points after becoming a father again, to twins. Sleepless nights and mustard nappies have done nothing to diminish his deadly come hitherness.

Mmm, who else? Matt Damon. Actually, no, he won't do. there's something about the nose. Bourne or no Bourne, he just ain't daddy totty. He's a second-rate Daniel Craig.

And speaking of Craig, you heard it here first. He's going to be a daddy too. No, I do not have my lens trained on his bedroom window, and I'm not sleeping with his PR. But you just know he's unleashing some fiendishly strong swimmers on his new wife, don't you? Giving her the Goldfinger, so to speak. It's been months since he turned 40, and got hitched. Bond baby, coming up. I'll bet moneypenny on it.There should be a law against such flagrant celebrity hotty procreation. It's obscene. It gives ordinary dads ideas. Like Hugh Grant's character in About a Boy, dads with small children - often single, but certainly not exclusively so - are working their daddy totty status to the max.

They've started going out with said progeny on their own, or, worse, in pairs with other daddy totty, sometimes to cafes where single women hang out, looking a bit helpless, out of their depth, adorable, like Andrex puppies.

They've started wearing perfectly distressed combat trousers, scuffed sneakers, and seductively crumpled shirts with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow. They have bedhead hair and unshaven chins, the kind you can only get in a man salon. They've started taking time over how they smell - a potent combination of freshly laundered bed linen, baby powder and pheromone. It's a fragrance so irresistible you know that in the dead of night they are in the bathroom, talking in whispers with someone bearing an uncanny resemblance to Robert De Niro in Angelheart, re-negotiating the terms of that deal they made on their soul.

The worse thing? When their kid does something cute, in a two-year-old way, they meet your gaze and nail you with a hot daddy smile that promises so much more. Junior at the babysitter's. A turn around the bedroom. Their hands gripping your hips from behind while you are on all fours. A broken condom and a few wayward sperm on the most fertile day in your cycle. Maybe a post-shag sneaky fag. The kind they don't have any more because they are daddy totty.

F***ers.

I have been observing daddy totty up close and personal lately.

The first invited me round for pasta and a bottle of wine one evening. I had pretty much decided he was really too hairy, he talked about his ex-partner an awful lot for a guy who was apparently completely over the relationship, and he was a big R 'n' B fan. But then, unexpectedly, he hit me with the blackboard covered in his three-year-old's chalk drawings, the wall heavy with scrappy pictures of crayon houses and stick people, the thousand-and-one photographs of his smiling kiddies on dad days out at the beach, splashing about in muddy puddles, opening birthday presents, being bathed and cuddled and, well, loved. It was too much. Reader, I shagged him.

More recently, I was babysitting my niece in one of those playgrounds that looks like a Disney set. As I pursued her in what I imagined was the way of the 'mummy', from swing to slide, I became aware of a presence. Daddy totty. Wielding a small child under his arm, who he swiftly introduced to me as Magnus, he started up a conversation. From the other end of a toddler-sized see saw.

I gave him the once over. Well, this was a first. All those months online, and I meet Mr Right in a soft-play area. He ticked all the boxes. Attractive: check. Combats and crumpled shirt: check. Bedhead hair: check. I inhaled: check. He engaged me in banter, asked me about my daughter (okay, okay, I fessed up! For God's sake!), put his hand to my arm in an orchestratedly incidental way, threw me heart-breaking smiles. He wanted me.

And I wanted him. Clear the kids. Let's do it in the sandpit right now.

It was going so well until he mentioned how he'd brought Magnus to the playground to give his partner - not only Magnus's mum, but love of his life and all-round f***ing angel too by the sounds of it - a break. Of course. Daddy totty masquerading as single daddy totty who was actually devoted partner and father totty.

My mistake.

Which is why, from now on, I'm afraid I'm suspending outdoor aunty duties for a time. I'm avoiding playgrounds and cafes with buggy parking areas. I'm giving Brad Pitt and the whole daddy totty scene a wide birth (berth).