"I do get low patches, yeah," says Emma Bunton, her ebullient, giggle-laden torrent of chirpy chatter flecked, for once, with doubt. "I mean, obviously I spend days in bed going, 'Boo hoo, I"m so. . . I want a boyfriend.' But then I think to myself - and this is going to sound yuck - I am one of the luckiest girls in the world, but I have worked very hard." The voice turns soft, little, babyish. "And I do appreciate it - really."

But still no boyfriend? "Still no boyfriend." So, does she miss the sex? "Ooooooh!" It's a swooping shriek, the oooh-you-are-awful of Dick Emery emerging from the mobile lips and friendly face of the most popular - and the youngest - of the Spice Girls. "Oooh." Pause. Grin. Very little voice. "Sometimes. We all do. But, you know, it's funny; I said to one of my friends the other day: 'D'you think, 'cos I've been so lucky in other things, I might never, you know, find true love?"She leans forward and touches my wrist, the big blue eyes in the unmade-up face as worried as Bambi's on the edge of the deep dark forest. "Do you think so? Do you think I might be too lucky? Because sometimes I just sit down and I get in my deep moods and I think about everything and you know how they always say sometimes in life you don't get everything. . ."

She sits, clutching her Coke, at the big round blue table in the Spice Girls office, briefly overwhelmed by the enormities of life, longing and desire. Until - a trifle puzzled, and even more beguilingly - those Finchley-crossed-with-EastEnders tones begin to battle their way through the metaphysical thickets. "But, you know, I don't know if I'm not just cheerful." And she grins, and she chortles, and all is once again sunny in the cocoon that is Spiceworld.

Of course, Emma Bunton has plenty to be cheerful about. She is a bouncy, friendly, life-enhancing soul. She has an enviably close relationship with her mother. She is a member of the most successful girl-band in history - more than 40 million albums sold so far. She is reckoned to be worth at least £15 million - not bad for a 23-year-old who admits she could easily have ended up behind a till at Sainsbury"s.

"When I was little, I always used to say I wanted to be a check- out girl 'cos I liked the noise. Bing!" She"s got her own single - "What I Am" - being released on 1 November; recorded with the band Tin Tin Out, it's a pleasant poppy reworking of the Edie Brickell original, accompanied by a pleasant poppy video that shows off lots of Emma"s impish charm and a little of her black bra. "I wanted a video that would make people think: 'They"re having a really good time.' because when I watch someone who looks like they don't want to be there, I want to run on stage and kick 'em up the arse!"

And, best of all, the Spice Girls - despite the precipitate departure of Geri Halliwell, seemingly the group's leader, in May last year - have chalked up two more number ones; sold out Madison Square Garden in a record 12 minutes; survived the pregnancies and ostentatious weddings of two of their members; and are now back together, Emma (or Baby),Victoria (or Posh), Mel B (or Scary) and Mel C (or Sporty), in Abbey Road Studios, cutting their third album. "It"s just well, I"ll keep it that we've had such a laugh. It"s been like a really great girl gang getting back together. Obviously, we've all grown up, and we're all doing our individual things, but when we come back together, we're like kids."

From anyone else, that would sound not just yuck but like so much showbiz hogwash. But from Emma Bunton you believe it. Partly because she is so open, amiable and enthusiastic - just the sort of perky blonde you'd love to buy a cocktail (with umbrella) for on your Greek island summer holiday. And partly because she clearly loves being a Spice Girl more than anything else in the world (except, perhaps, her mum, who crops up constantly, and tenderly, in conversation). Indeed, someone who has worked closely with the group suggests that Emma is the glue that binds an otherwise indifferent crew together: that she's so loveable, and cherishable, and (relatively) uncalculating that she is the Child of the Group, the one they can all be friends with, and the one they can hug.

There's certainly a flurry of hugging as Emma arrives at the Spice Girls neat blond-wood-floored office in a manky sidestreet off the Edgware Road. Mel B is already there, down in the basement, conferring with logo designers, and fiddling with a new, chunky Spice Girls key-ring: "This is great," she says, her voice as Yorkshire as Dickie Bird's, "really great." She pulls a button and that insistent "I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want" riff echoes through the room. She grimaces: "Well, maybe not so great." Then Emma's there, shrugging off her coat in the room next door, and there"s a cacophony of girlie bonding. "Aaah," says one of the Spice Girls' staff, smiling an indulgent smile. It must be at least two days since they last saw each other.

It isn't; they were, Emma tells me, "out last night. It's not as though we haven't seen each other, but that's what it's like - it's really lovely. Cos actually we don"t get lots of time to really go out and party and stuff. So when we do, it's nice."

Does she get drunk? "Oh no. I"m not a big drinker - only when I'm with her." She gestures at Mel, and chortles, as she does throughout the interview; it's almost a nervous tic, a Pavlovian high-pitched heh-heh-heh. Life, after all, is a laugh. "No, she's a terrible influence on me, because I don't actually enjoy the taste of alcohol. If I'm going to drink, I'll have, you know, a glass of champagne with peach juice in it."

So she's not a sex, drugs, let's be naughty like Robbie Williams sort of chick? "Oh no, I wouldn"t like to be naughty" [naughty, like lovely, comes over as naught-ay and lovel-ay. Think "Rick-ay" and "Bianc-uh"].

"I like goin' out and having a good time but - and I know it sounds weird - it's just not me. I'd rather be at home. I mean, my birthday - it's lovely - we have all my family around and have a cake and have all the kids round." She claps her hands, another mannerism. "I love all that. I'm not rock "n" roll."

But drugs? After all, any self-respecting band on tour. . . "I know, it's mad, isn't it? But no. And I think with the drugs thing, I'm scared. And I've never come into contact with it at all. Ever. And everyone goes, 'You're lying, you're in the pop industry.' And I"m like, 'Well, there you go.' So I"m really proud of it. I love it."

And the fresh-faced little girl - she"s five feet two inches tall - grins her Rebecca of High Road, North Finchley grin and sets out to captivate another listener. (She knows the power of blonde and the charm of cute: "I can get away with murder, I can," she's said in the past.) She's fetchingly natural, her blonde hair tousled and a little unkempt. ("I've only just woken up. Terrible.") Her Nike trainers are black-and-white; her cargo trousers, from the American chain store, Express, a darkish red; and her black, round-necked T-shirt has a small Playboy Bunny made of rhinestones on its front. As she leans forward to emphasise a point, the T-shirt rides up, exposing some of the puppy-fat - "I'm not the smallest of girls" - that made Baby Spice so accessible a soul-mate for her youthful fans.

But she's famous now, and thinner, and rich; can she still be the girl next door, the one who liked to go shopping in Brent Cross? Does she, in fact, have a life?

"Oh yeah. I mean, I was in Brent Cross this week, buying my creams and stuff. Yeah, I really do, I do have a life. And I'm a Top Shop girl, Brent Cross Top Shop, and Miss Selfridge. I mean, you either take that route of [pompous voice] 'I'm famous and I can't go down to the shops any more', or you take the route of 'I'm famous, and of course some kids are going to come up to me and ask for an autograph' - and, personally, I think that if I was worried about that, then there"s something wrong. Because, at the end of the day, that's why I'm here."

But hasn't there been quite a price to pay? Haven't you found yourself being betrayed by former boyfriends?

"Uh huh." She sighs a deep, depressed sigh. "I went through a stage where a couple of boyfriends [four of her more serious relationships, in fact sold stories, and one of them really hurt. And I don't think people realise: it really hurts in your tummy. You feel a bit sick, and it's like 'Ugh'. And now I have to go on my gut instinct otherwise I'd just lose trust in everyone. It'd be awful."

And is it working?

"No, not at the moment. I'm single! So it can't be! But, you know, when I'm walking round Brent Cross and a couple of kids come up, I love it - and I think, 'Oh, God, when it stops, that"s when I'll start worrying."

Very sensible, too, because Emma Bunton is indeed a very lucky girl. She was not, after all, one of the ur-Spice Girls; not one of the five girls chosen when Bob and Chris Herbert, their original managers, put an ad in the Stage that read "RU 18-23 with the ability to sing/dance? RU streetwise, outgoing, ambitious and dedicated?"; not one of the girls who were installed in a house in Maidenhead to create the bubblegum (with attitude) pop phenomenon that the Spices became.

No, Emma's predecessor was Michelle Stephenson, who left the band because "her heart wasn't in it" and whose bank manager must still rue the day. Emma was a replacement, approached by Pepi Lemer, the Spice Girls" vocal coach, who had taught her a couple of years earlier. (Emma has a showbiz past. Her first solo - school show - appearance was as a moonbeam; she swiftly moved on to become the Milky Bar Kid"s girlfriend in the television advertisements, and progressed, via catalogue modelling, to the Sylvia Young drama school at the age of 11; which was, for her, "like one big family - it was lovely". Her contemporaries there included Denise Van Outen, Samantha Janus and three of All Saints - Nick, Mel and Nat. "All blonde - ha ha ha - aren't they? And the funny thing is, we weren't. . . Well, there was always the special girls in the school who went up for everything and got everything, and we were always the ones at the back who weren't very good. And we"ve done better."

So, like the other Spice Girls, she was ambitious and she was dedicated. But streetwise? Emma had never left home before: "And I remember that first night, I sat here and I thought, 'I'm really homesick. Now do I sit here and cry on my own, or do I go and let the others know how I feel?' And I thought, if I'm going to be in this, I've got to be honest with them. So I went to Geri and I went, [weepy voice] 'I miss my mum.' And she just gave me a hug and we went to the other girls and talked about things. And I was, like, 'Can we have scrambled eggs on toast?' And Mel B's like, 'Yeah, come on,' 'cos the others were fitness fanatics and didn't eat much."

Aaaah. Isn't that sweet? Don't you just want to take her in your arms and love her? You'd be right to, because what you see with Emma Bunton is, pretty much, what you get. But it's as well to remember that, according to Kate Thornton, then editor of the hugely influential teen pop magazine Smash Hits, it was sweet unpushy Emma Bunton who gave her the hardest sell when the band - then unknown - invaded the magazine's office in "a riot of noise and colour" and sang an a cappella anthem to girl power. "We're going to be massive," Bunton said. "Will you do a piece on us? Help out your fellow women?" Smash Hits did - and even more crucially invented those memorable sobriquets: Ginger, Posh, Scary, Sporty - and Baby.

"Baby" was perfect. Emma had a penchant for pigtails, knee socks, lollipops and white minis. Kids could relate to her; mildly dirty old men could lose themselves in Lolita fantasies. "Yeah, it was a bit naughty, wasn't it? But, actually, no, at the time I didn't think about it being. . .But I do now. And I used to have a couple of oldish men writing me mucky mail. And it's weird when you get letters saying they want to touch your bottom and 'While I"m looking at your picture. . .'. And I was getting them to the house where I used to live. And that was a bit scary." (There are, by the way, 16,454 sites on the internet that respond to a search for spicegirlssexstories; one is underagelolitas.com).

"Baby", though, must have its drawbacks. In Spiceworld (1997), the band"s feature film, Emma muses, mock-mournfully, on the baggage her nickname brings: "Baby", she says, "how can I be Baby when I"m 30?" That, she now says, was just a joke. For her, the name sits easily with the notion that cuteness is the best sexiness - "you don"t have to have your boobs hanging out: you do it in a subtle way." For her, "Baby" can be said in a way that is sweet, or tough, as in "Hey, baby," as uttered by the heaviest hood from GoodFellas.

But can she honestly believe that Baby, Posh and the gang can still be smile-smile-smiling their way round the world's stadia in ten years' time? On the plus side are the facts that she loves the music the Spice Girls make - "I like it to make you smile; even a ballad should make you smile" - and that the band have ridden out Geri Halliwell's departure so well. (The girls have not spoken since, but Emma did watch the lengthy documentary about Halliwell: "I thought it was quite interesting. . . I just hope she isn't too lonely.") The girls' separate accounts of Geri's disappearance are instructive: Emma (and Mel C) spout the approved line that, "Well, we're girls, and we bicker, but we were sisters. And on the day before she left we were on a jet back from somewhere, and we were laughing and joking, and the next day she wasn't coming back." Mel B is more catty: "She wasn"t one of the best singers or the best dancers. I suppose it's annoying when you're only known for your lips and your boobs."

Against this is the sense that each of the remaining Spice Girls is marking out her own territory - Mel C has been quoted as saying that the Spice Girls are now "like a hobby". Certainly, both Mel B and Mel C have already had successful solo singles - or semi-solo: both were collaborations, with Missy Elliot and Bryan Adams respectively; both are recording, or have recorded, solo albums in a style that takes them away from the cheerful pre-teenery of the Spice Girls. (Not that Mel C"s grunge reincarnation has won the hearts and minds of older audiences; in August she was pelted with beer cans at the V99 festival in Staffordshire.) As for Victoria, she has so voraciously embraced the vanity of celebrity that she must be in danger of alienating the entire country, let alone her fan base. (Emma, though, loved the Beckhams' wedding and downplays its grandiosity: "If anyone had been there it was the most beautiful thing. I mean, at the ceremony there was only 15 people. And I was crying my eyes out; it was like in a cove thing, all greenery, and she walked through, and they were both crying, and it was just lovely."

Emma, naturally, is having none of this Spice-Girls-Are-Coming-to-an-End scenario: "The Spice Girls are our priority. All the other little things are lovely to do, but we work around what the Spice Girls are doing. We enjoy it. We've never said we were soul divas or the best at anything - we just enjoy getting up there. And I love seeing kids' faces smiling from the audience. And I'm not bothered at all that they're kids. I think it's very flattering because they're not corrupted by anything, they like what they like. And they like me because they like me - it's lovely."

All those "lovelys" bring Barbara Windsor to mind - not because Emma Bunton has big breasts, or goes out with gangsters, or has affairs with older men like Sid James. (Though there was a strong rumour, equally strongly denied, that Emma had an affair with Simon Fuller, the manager the band sacked just after they met Nelson Mandela - "one of the happiest moments of my life," according to the Nobel Peace Prize-winner.) Rather, it's because Emma, like Barbara, is the essence of the loveable Londoner, a real darlin', the girl-next-door who's made good; the girl who"s bought her mum, dad and brother motorcars with personalised numberplates while she drives an S-reg Mercedes SLK; the girl whose favourite restaurant is still Chix-Chox, in High Road, North Finchley, an Italian place she goes with her old friends - Dawn, for instance, whom she has known since she was four, and Alison, and Donna; the girl who rhapsodises about waking up in the three-bedroom Hertfordshire house she bought her mother: "My mum was in the pool, swimmin', my dogs were barkin', my brother was in the garden, doin' a barbecue, his girlfriend was in his bedroom playin' music, and I love all that."

But even Babies have to leave the nest, and Emma Bunton has bought her own place, a penthouse flat in Hampstead. "I should be moving in in a month but I think I'm delaying it because it's my first time out of home, so it's sort of scary."

Has she bought her furniture?

"Not yet. But I've got all my ideas. I'm going to get Mel B to help me, her house is fantastic. I want it to be very warm, very homey, with massive sofas so it'll be really comfortable when you come round."

Can she cook?

"No, but you can come and have beans on toast if you want. I do a great Egg Beano - that's toast, and beans, and an egg with melted cheese on top. But I've been thinking that when I get into my kitchen - it's a beautiful kitchen, and it's already done, and there was a cookbook there - actually, I'm going to learn how to cook."

And give fashionable dinner-parties?

"Yeah, I'm gonna try." She chortles. "I might buy it in and pretend I made it."

It's a cosy vision for a cosy girl: nights in with the video - she likes "easy-watching" movies like Notting Hill and Shakespeare in Love, "though I did like Pulp Fiction; something with a bit of edge" - and occasionally a book. "I"m not a fiction girl, but I"ve read stuff about the Krays, and Myra Hindley, and I'm reading one now - this is going to sound awful - about a girl's who's married and she's a prostitute and I want to see how that works out". Perhaps Leonardo DiCaprio - her dream date - will be there: "I met him recently and he was really sweet, but it was over very quick, so I'd like to find out if he's just a normal 23-year-old."

More likely, though, it'll be Mel B and her husband, Jimmy Gulzar, and Victoria and David, and Mel C and whoever she's with. And Emma's mum, and her brother, and her old Finchley mates - and, I hope, someone who this enormously likeable girl's gut instinct has taught her to trust: her true love, for whom she can rustle up a knockout Egg Beano and with whom she can cuddle up till hell freezes over. And it"ll be just lovely.