Downright Shakespearean this phrase: pregnancy as belly-bubble on a dame.  The implication being I Was Already Doing ABC when you weren’t even born.

See also the bestellar reviews, complete with rich quote-mosaics, of Adam Nicolson’s magnificent Why Homer Matters and Logue’s War Music, a muscular rendition of several books of the Iliad. 

‘When you were what? –

A bubble on a dam?’

Christopher Logue, War Music: An account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of Homer’s Iliad, London: Faber and Faber, 2001, p. 20