There's no doubt about it, I'm on the game. Experienced, I get tarted up to go out on the pitch and the quantity of slap shows intention. Tell me the trick and I'll perform, no matter how big the crowd. You want to talk first?

Let me know your thoughts. My own words are persuasive, and believe me, darling, I'll be really sweet to you if you get your chequebook out.

Two hundred here, a thousand there, a promise of twenty thousand, the perpetual dream of the elusive high-rollers, the odd knockback which makes you feel so sad... Nobody said it would be enjoyable. But since 2002 I've been at it ­ no going back to the old, lazy, innocent days. Can anybody introduce me to an old-fashioned millionaire?

The fact is, although I detest committees and cringe at the label "good works", conscience dictates I have to do my thing. With little time to spare, I feel obliged to spend some of it raising money for my cause. Yes, there's always A Cause. I got on this money-raising treadmill in 2002 as chair of a £2-million appeal to build a state-of-the-art new children's theatre here in my beloved city of Bath. In 2005, bang on time, The Egg opened to fanfares, and I thought, "Now that's done and I'm glad it's over" ­ like the deflowered typist in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. No more, I thought.

But I was soon lured along to see the old Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Royal United Hospital, Bath ­ and that was it. The staff were doing their best in horribly cramped and noisy conditions. Matron Debbie explained that the incubators used to be smaller, and how modern medicine has generally rendered the current unit totally inadequate. There's no space for the parents to sit or to be spoken to in private and the general movement of mums, dads, doctors and nurses was like watching one of those complicated dances in a period movie. I looked at the anxious faces of the mums and dads of those tiny, vulnerable babies and I was there ­ inside their very skins.

For both my children started life in intensive care and so I know exactly what it's like to hold your breath each day as the paediatrician turns to you with a progress report. So I was in. I'm president of a £4.5-million appeal to build a magnificent new low-carbon, sustainable NHS NICU, to set new standards in the healthcare of premature babies.

That's why I find myself making a little speech on a Friday night, asking a key group of people for support. "We've got £500,000 already," I tell them, as touching photographs of minuscule babies (500 admitted each year) flash up behind me, "and we're looking to raise £1 million by July when the public phase begins." "What on earth are you on about?" mutters the voice inside my head. "Where the hell are you going to get that kind of dosh by summer?" But the mouth is still talking optimistically ­ as it must. When you're on the game you have to keep smiling.

It fades when a pleasant person takes me aside to demur that giving money for a unique children's theatre is one thing, but ­ let's face it ­ if a new NICU is really so badly needed, shouldn't the NHS fund it? YES! I want to shout, but it ain't going to. We have to get real. In 1979, then a columnist on the Daily Mirror, I excoriated this country's Third World standards of maternity care, writing, "Why do we accept this situation? In 1976 a government report criticised the care of mothers and infants and called the tragic situation 'a holocaust'. Worse still... since 1945, 30 documents have been produced in Britain saying that good care can prevent handicap ­ and nothing has been done." Today at least 43 maternity units face cutbacks and closures ­ yet the babies keep coming. Work it out.

If we want to save the extra-special tiny ones we'll have to do it ourselves. But can you blame me for seething at the lunatic spiralling costs of the dreaded Olympics? I wake brooding on hedge-fund millionaires and wonder if any of them were once premature babies. I read about the money Philip Green spends on a birthday bash for his rich "buddies" (does he really know they care?) and want to pluck his sleeve whispering that there might be a minuscule Kate Moss born too soon who needs his help... Hey guys, one little bitty million?

Onwards with the fundraising events and hopes for a windfall from a big trust or generous individual. My friend says, "Hey, Bel, at an auction of promises you could offer dinner to some fan of your Times advice column and listen to all his troubles!" "Yeah," I say, "I'll do anything." See? Shameless.

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