'Can we all take a minute,' I slurred at 4 o'clock on Sunday morning, 'to raise a glass,' I lifted my commemorative Royal Wedding mug, 'to Beyoncé and Jay-Z,' took a drink, 'and their bump.'
'No,' my friend Marlee replied, staunchly leaving her drink on the side.
I was phoneless in Budapest when B revealed her pregnancy in the most high-profile of ways, at the VMA awards, to a viewing public of 12.4 million. A fellow lover of all things Ms Knowles thoughtfully posted on my Facebook wall as soon as the news broke, and when my sister and I stole away in the dead of night to an Internet café in order to check that nothing drastic had happened at home (and by drastic, obviously, I mean along the lines of someone we took GCSE Biology with changing their profile picture), I was faced with news that, although I didn't think I'd ever thought about it before, I suddenly knew I'd been waiting a long time to hear. 'Beyoncé's pregnant!' I announced, eliciting a look of dismay from the Hungarian AC/DC fan in the corner. My sister nodded in a non-committal way. 'She's pregnant!' I said again. 'OK,' said my sister.
I woke up the next morning in a state of perpetual excitement, clenching my toes and prancing about. Weirdly enough, the only thing I can possibly attribute this to was the fact that I knew that Beyoncé was having a baby. The thought of it kept visiting me throughout the week. What will it look like? I wondered. Will it get all her good bits? Ooh, I hope its a girl, I thought. What will she call it? Will she be a pushy mum? It went on and on and on, even more so than the two occasions that I've received the tremulous 'you're going to be an (honorary) auntie' phone call from my own close friends.
Managing to abstain from the Beyoncé baby-talk for the first seven hours of my inaugural night back in England was pretty good going I thought. So why, at 4am, was Marlee refusing to discuss all of the things that had been going through my head all week, when I really should probably have been paying attention to Budapest's cidatel, its cathedral, its galleries, or even just its incredibly beautiful streets? She had been stuck in London! Hadn't she given that foetus a minute's thought?!
'No,' she said again, flatly. 'It is not exciting to me.'
'But -'
'Georgina having a baby,' she interrupted, namechecking my best friend, who is due December 9th, 'that's exciting. We can touch that baby. We will never see Beyoncé's baby. WHY ARE YOU SO EXCITED?!?!?!?!'
I couldn't really answer her in a satisfactory way. I will never meet the baby, in spite of the elaborate plans I am currently constructing to make sure that at some point, in adulthood, it meets Georgina's baby, also in adulthood, and the two of them will fall madly in love, probably resulting in marriage and children of their own. I woke up with the mother of all hangovers and in a moment of head pounding clarity I realised - it's not the baby part of the equation that excites me, not really.
If you haven't seen Beyoncé's 2011 performance at the Billboard awards, I implore you to watch it now . I am yet to meet someone that the Youtube clip didn't render completely speechless, including the bouncer on the door of our local snooker club, who, after grudgingly taking his iPhone out of his pocket to search it, actually thanked me for forcing him to. She is a storm of a woman, at once ragingly beautiful, devastatingly talented, in places soothing, in others frightening, and I have never seen her embody all of these things so perfectly as she does there. Watching for the first time as she dismounted the stage and yelled a line from 'Girls (Run the World)' right in the face of a gobsmacked Glee cast member, my flatmate turned to me and whispered, 'I've got goosebumps... on my face.' The performance succinctly summarises her work ethic, her determination; in short, the fact that she is a complete and utter perfectionist.
It also tells us something subliminally, which I think we all already knew: Beyoncé's career is, and for a very long time obviously has been, the biggest and most important thing in her life. No one gets to be that brilliant at something by putting anything else first, and she is yet to fail at anything. All four of her solo albums have hit #1 on the US Billboard chart, she has received two Golden Globe nominations and, as her husband Jay-Z once so perfectly put it, she is, undoubtedly, 'the hottest chick in the game.' Yet what this baby means is that, as of now, something else is always going to come before everything else. In fact, rumours are already circulating that filming for Clint Eastwood's remake of A Star Is Born will be 'pushed back' to accommodate Baby-Z, which says a lot about Beyoncé's work ethic; but also perhaps about her misconception of what is about to happen to her. I don't know one new mother who has been able to prepare herself, in any way, for that first day back at work; in fact, I know some who've scrimped and saved so as to stay at home with their baby rather than face the separation. These are normal women who would miss out on luxuries (like, for example, having to buy Sainsbury's own rather than Andrex) to spend precious time with their babies. Beyoncé and Jay-Z have a combined wealth of around $750 million, so she'll be able to afford to take time out, when, at the last minute, she realises that leaving behind her child to go and reprise a role once played by Barbara Streisand is a tougher decision than she thought. Maybe the thing I'm most excited about is watching how motherhood will change one of the true icons of our age, perhaps in ways she doesn't yet anticipate herself.