Apparently they have a thing about traditional children's clothes and think nothing of spending pounds 70 on a dress.Then there's The White House. Having never dared to breach the threshold of its Bond Street store, the catalogue was an eye-opener. It wasn't so much that you could buy a child's coat for pounds 600 and party dresses for several hundred that shocked me, it was the fact that they boasted "a generous hem and seams to allow for maximum wear". You could be forgiven for thinking that babies emerge from the womb in a Babygro, but apparently some still wear hand-stitched lace-trimmed nighties and matinee jackets. I was curious to know who patronised one particular very exclusive small company which makes traditional baby clothes like these, so I rang the owner, expecting her to reel off a list of clients headed by that well-known frugal shopper the Duchess of York. No, said the woman, 75 per cent of her customers were Romanies. As I rang round people such as Sally Judd, who makes traditional quilts stuffed with sheep's wool that is hand-washed in spring water and then hand-teased, I realised that somewhere in life I had taken the wrong turning.

There were these people sitting making lovely things in their kitchens while their rosy- cheeked children played out in the orchard, and here was I being ratty with my pale-faced little urbanites because I had a book to finish.The market in mail-order children's clothes is huge and varied. Many of the businesses are set up by women who have had their own babies and combined recognition of a gap in the market with their own desire to stay at home. Others have been quietly doing their own thing for years: unassuming geniuses such as Peter Markey, who from his home in Wales makes stunning mechanical paper animals, sold as cut- outs printed on two cards of recycled paper for 90p. I could spend my advance twice over (not hard, it has to be said) on products that never see the light of a shop window. When the high streets are full of cloned goods, mail order is where you find the designer makers. If having a baby hasn't put you off sex for good, this should do the trick.Although "Bright Start" remains my favourite as an introduction to the joys of parenthood (it also features Absorb-a-Mess - sprinkle it over vomit and diarrhoea and simply vacuum away) there are hundreds of fascinating companies.

You thought it was the babies that wore bibs? Here a doting daddy wears a giant protective device (probably over a green and purple anorak) to feed the junior food-splatterer. All those years I'd been tucking Matisse postcards into the sides of my newborns' cots in the hope of fine-tuning their sensitivities and now I find from all the baby equipment catalogues that they can only see black and white.Manufacturers prey on new mothers' insecurities, but we are willing suckers. In your heart you know you would have to be the most over-protective, neurotic mother to buy protective "knee bumpers" for your crawling baby But then you look at those precious little dimpled knees. The same catalogue, "Bright Start", gives us the "parent bib". As catalogues came tumbling through my letter box I couldn't believe what I'd been missing: if only I still had a baby to stimulate. Powerful, glamorous women - the sort who have breakfast meetings - they were all at it: apparently they don't have time to shop in the week and like to leave weekends free for quality time with the children.

As usual, I was lagging behind (by the time I have breakfast meetings they will have started having early-morning-cup-of-tea-in-bed meetings). Mail order was not just about depressed housewives, it was about being Busy and a Good Mother too. It was Superwoman's crutch.Loath to admit that I was not too busy to shop, and that I went to the shops at weekends to escape the children (bang goes the halo on my publicity machine's "mother-of-four" tag), I plunged into the world of mail order. This book was not pulp materialism - it was about social engineering, it was environmentally sound, and I could be really foul about Pocahontas sweatshirts in it.As I warmed to the idea and admitted to people the subject of my book, I was amazed by how many of them were secret mail-order junkies. This only evoked a vision of depressed mothers driven further into isolation, mindlessly flicking through their Grattan catalogues while their kids soak up breakfast television, without even the prospect of a visit to the shops to brighten the horizon. Then I realised my attitude had been conditioned by the Nineties presumption that shopping is a "leisure pursuit" - that green-and-purple-anoraked families take in shopping malls between visits to National Trust houses, while their more fashion-conscious counterparts parade the King's Road, wearing their immaculately conceived (sartorially speaking) offspring on their shoulders Maybe shopping from home was not such a bad idea. The streets would be clear of green and purple anoraks and there was always the chance that parents might find something more stimulating to do with the children than drag them round Marks & Spencer They might even play with them Suddenly, I was a woman with a mission.