HURRAH for Kristie Allsopp! Instead of sticking us with a load of old guff about how she manages to look great, look after her kids, keep her home clean and get everything done she admits: “I couldn’t do it all myself,” and then gives us a giant list of all her professional help.

“You see masses of pictures of famous people walking through airports with their child in their arms and you think ‘where is the bag with the bottles, the wipes, the clothes with stains on where they’ve been sick,” says Kirstie.

Where indeed? Kirstie insists she is acutely aware that her situation is ‘frankly unrealistic’ for most people and that: “It’s totally to do with finance.”

This interview in which she said this should be cut and pasted on the grubby fridge door of every single UK mother who has ever burst into tears as she tried to juggle paid employment with child-raising, without the benefit of a nanny, granny and a nice cleaning lady.

For the past two decades ordinary mums have been bombarded with the outrageous fiction that you can ‘have it all’, by celebs and women journalists who fail to report on the army of helpers that enable women at the top to live their privileged lives.

No wonder so many young mums are suffering with post-natal depression because they can’t understand why they aren’t back in their jeans after a few weeks, like skinny celebs Mylene Klass and Liz Hurley.

In a survey for the Royal College of Midwives it was discovered that nearly two thirds of new mums felt pressurized to lose weight and many felt ‘disgusted’ by their own bodies, especially after comparing them to what they read and saw in the media. But how they are supposed to achieve this when their every waking hour is spent caring for their child is anyone’s guess.

A few years on and the same women battle to run their home, keep their children happy and be a good employee, all the while wondering why their home life never seems to match up to what they see in the media. Their sense of bewilderment over this is compounded by the fact that their own mums were never pressured to this extent to have a career, family and a spotless home.

My kids are nearly grown-up now, but even in the last few years I’ve noticed that the pressure is on again. As a mate recently put it: “When did it become necessary for women to feel that not only should they run the home, kids and work, they should also be starting up a little internet business, be really good at craft and cooking and start doing voluntary work?”

I don’t know. But what is true is that women who portray themselves as superwoman when they know damn well they’re not are not only kidding us – they’re kidding themselves, too.