DIY vs NHS

The pull cord in my bathroom that turns the shower on is bust and I need to put in a new switch. To get an electrician round would cost £65, plus VAT. I decide to do it myself, but maybe it’s more complicated than I thought? The switch has a little light on it and everything. I phone my dad.

‘Yes, ‘course you can just do it yourself. It’s simple. You’re meant to get an electrician these days, but that’s all come from the EU.’ For my dad, everything can be traced back to the EU somehow. The EU or muslims.

My dad offers me a lift to B&Q. He comes round the next morning so it turns out that I am out when the health visitor comes. My mum tagged along with dad so she could see the baby, but she ends up making herself busy in the kitchen while the health visitor quizzes Lynne. Where were our parents born? How were we coping financially? Did we take drugs? Was Lynne a victim of domestic abuse? The health visitor points out that if Lynne told her anything that concerned her, she would have to pass it on to social services. It’s lucky that my mum was in the kitchen leafing through recipe books while the health visitor was saying all this; if she’d heard it she would have gone berserk.

Of course, the only box the health visitor could tick after speaking to Lynne is the one marked Smug. The health visitor weighs the baby who is now a whopping 9lbs. Oh, and I forgot to mention the umbilical chord has completely come away and I am please to confirm that my child has a beautiful innie belly button.

B&Q with my dad is a blast. We look at drill bits and argue about whether treacherous politically correct town councils are trying to rebrand Christmas as Winterval to appease the muslim community. I opine that it’s all a bunch of tabloid bullshit, while he thinks that this used to be a Great Country. Look at it now. I’m scared to ask what he thinks is wrong with it in case I’m disappointed with the answer. Instead I tell him he should stop buying the Sun. He says that he only buys it for the puzzles. I don’t believe this. The puzzles in the Sun are really easy.

It turns out he is right though. Rewiring the switch in the bathroom is a piece of piss.

Cluster Feeding

At the moment we are completely baby-lead. That is the technical term for it. This means that the baby gets what it wants when it wants. The baby is too small for us to have it any other way, but it does mean that Lynne is up feeding her at all hours of the night, while the baby has a nice long sleep in the late morning/early afternoon. Not very convenient.

Lynne has been trying to express milk into bottles that we can keep in the fridge, but it needs a little more practice. This morning I fed the baby from a bottle that was in the fridge, the most plentiful expression so far, an abundant 8oml. This is not enough for the baby. Still, it keeps her quiet so that Lynne can have another half hour's sleep. It's an odd feeling, holding a suckling baby in my arms, watching her serious eyes gaze at me over the plastic curve of the bottle. It's amazing to think that anyone could be so small and helpless. So dependent on me.

The baby is having a growth spurt and wants to be fed all the time. This is aparently how it works; the baby goes through periods of 'cluster feeding', demanding milk all the time to fuel a period of growth. It lasts for a few days and then returns to normal. Until I can bottle feed this is harder on Lynne than me. On the upside, Virgin 1 is showing Unbeatable Banzuke at Jesus Christ o'clock in the morning most days. It has Brian Blessed in it. And he is dressed like this

Absolutely fantastic. Look at his shiny little codpiece. Brian is as always, really very good value. It takes a lot of front to carry off a costume like this.

My daughter is certainly getting bigger, her eyes can focus now, large and solemn, but she shows little interest in any soft toys, even ones that rattle and squeak. She likes to start the day early. She snuffles and gurgles every morning from about 6am. The temptation to check on the baby when she starts burbling is irresistable, but she is always, always just happily thrashing around in her blanket. I ignore her for as long as possible, then I get up and take her into the other room so that Lynne can sleep in peace.

Friday Morning

The baby won't really settle in her bouncy chair and while I can pick her up, I can't type one-handed. I have changed her nappy and heated up a bottle for her, but she pushed it away after a couple of wee slurps. I think she just wants to stop me filling out this application form. Have you ever tried to demonstrate a competency for Personal Effectiveness-Collaboration with a crying child in one arm? Its actually not that easy.

The closing date is noon today, and I have done as much as possible by trawling the myriad other applications on my hard drive, cutting and pasting what I could. I was meant to finish it last night but I was too tired and got distracted by the telly. I will make it though. One of the competencies is, after all, Delivering Results-Motivation.

Quote of the Day

Lynne has been trying to express milk. It involves a manual pump with a little bottle hanging underneath.

'But I'm not a cow,' says Lynne in a small voice. She has started saying this a lot.

Sorry, I had to Wait For My Arse To Subside

I have been ill since the weekend. Pissing out of my arse to be precise. Between the baby and me it’s been like living in an open sewer in here. We’ve been working in shifts.

But now I’m back. What’s been happening? On Friday I went to the Registry Office and reported the baby to the authorities. She is now legal with a birth certificate and everything. We had to register her within 21 days of her birth and I was tempted to leave it and see what happened. Would they have deported my baby? Would there have been a dawn raid? A midnight flight to Diego Garcia and a crèche full of orange sleepsuits? But I bottled out and conformed in the end. I didn’t even give her any comedy names, I left her middle name as her gran’s, even though her gran hasn’t acted nearly grateful enough about that.

I also went to the doctor’s to get a new prescription for nicotine gum. My doctor is a big, round, grey haired guy with pilots’ glasses who is normally pleased to see me. I think that he is glad to see someone sensible after all the bams and old dears he has to deal with, and if that seems patronising to you, then you should see his fucking waiting room. Even though large glasses on the older male are a sure sign of an arsehole and the doc does spit when he’s talking, I think he’s ok. I expected to spend a wee half hour talking about his wife’s horses and how much he misses smoking himself, but this time he was all brusque and businesslike. He had a medical student in with him and was trying to pretend he was the Man in front of him. He didn’t want to give me the gum again because I have been getting it on and off for ten months now, but I reckon he was just talking tough in front of the new guy. He gave in in the end.

If you have never tried nicotine gum, its pretty disgusting. As you chew the nicotine gets released and you feel a stinging sensation on your tongue, a numbness spreading over the backs of your gums, then your gullet tightens and your gorge starts to rise. But then, if you remember, your first cigarette was pretty disgusting too wasn’t it? And you get used to the gum if it’s your only source of nicotine. I quite like it now. I really should be weaning myself off it, and hopefully with the baby on the scene I will be busy enough to keep my mind of the withdrawal. Giving up smoking is a funny thing, its easy if you want to do it, impossible if you don’t, but either way you need to really keep yourself occupied if you are going to stand a chance. I’m still going to have a cigar at Christmas though. But from now on I’ll have to go outside to do it.

Quote of the Day

Lynne left the house yesterday. She went to Boots to buy some nappies. I stayed in the house with the baby because I am ill. When Lynne came back she said,

'I'm glad we didn't take her on her first trip outside to Boots. I saw a drunk man. And some litter.'

Clearly this outrage cannot stand.

'I don't like it! I don't like it!'

The baby can’t hold her head up on her own, especially not in a bath of water, so I have my hands under her neck and back. For a few moments it seems that she might get used to the bath, but then I submerge her further and she starts screaming again.

‘Right, that’ll do,’ says Lynne.
‘You’re joking aren’t you?’ I say. ‘You haven’t even washed her face!’
The baby continues screaming. Lynne rubs the cloth quickly round her cheeks and forehead.
‘There,’ she says.
I shift my hands to get one free and splash some water gently over my daughter’s chest. Her eyes are screwed up, little face puckered crimson, shrieking at the top of her tiny lungs. I laugh.

Lynne gets the towel. ‘Come on. That’s it,’ she snaps. With the baby crying like that, Lynne can’t handle it. Me, I have gone all the way through unconcerned and deep into cackling callously. The towel has a little hat in the corner, and Lynne put it on the baby’s head as I lifted her out. Lynne lays her down and delicately dabs her dry. My daughter has stopped making that horrible noise, but still looks aghast at the depth of our betrayal. Then she pees all over the towel.

We had left it ten days; the baby had had only one bath until now, in the hospital the afternoon after she was born. The midwives did that. We weren’t worried about our smelly baby, the community midwife told us not to worry about it, babies’ skin is very delicate and if you bath them too much when they're tiny its not good for them. The West End is full of babies with dry skin and eczema from being bathed daily by fussy mothers, while more, ahem, working class areas are full of healthy, dirty kids.

We have a wee baby bath and I filled it with a few inches of warm water, using my elbow to test it, making sure it was blood temperature, so I knew her dismay at being bathed didn’t come from the water being too hot. I leave flinging babies into boiling tubs to Attila the Hun. I think she just didn’t know what was happening to her, poor mite. Just when she thought she was beginning to work out how things worked, we take off all her clothes and dump her in all this weird stuff. Ha ha, I think. You'd better get used to it. We are going to do it again on Sunday.

Here is a picture of a shark. It's too big to fit in the bath, so it's a pretty tenuous illustration really.

Ball Sack Offender

It’s raining like hell so I don’t think we will be going on our big mission to the outside today. That was the plan, Lynne and the baby haven’t left the house since they came back from the hospital and we wanted to try out the sling thing, see whether Lynne could manage the stairs yet (we live on the top floor of an old red sandstone tenement), and just generally show the neighbourhood that even though we have a baby we won’t be pricking about the shops in matching waterproofs. We are not sponsored by Northface.

Lynne is asleep, as per the morning routine. The baby is in her bouncy chair, hiccupping. She does this a lot, because her diaphragm is not strong enough yet, but she doesn’t seem bothered. I couldn’t hiccup for as long as she can without getting really angry about it, but she can eat or fall asleep in the middle of a bout. That’s a life skill, remaining calm during prolonged hiccupping. Another life skill she has picked up is less positive. She still doesn’t cry much but she has discovered that if she gurgles as if she’s choking in the middle of the night it gets us out of bed and all the lights on far more effectively than anything else she could do.

As I changed the baby this morning I noticed that the umbilical cord, a scabby bit of black pudding with a white plastic clip on it that hangs from the baby’s navel, well that has started to come away. Its all gummy underneath, and I still can’t make out how the belly button is going to turn out. As I write this, I am looking out, through savage gusts of rain blowing against the window, into an iron sky and wondering if I can bring myself to love a child with an outie belly button.

That’s a joke. What isn’t a joke is that Lynne’s sister came to visit and I’m pretty sure she saw my balls. Yesterday morning I was up in my dressing gown and boxers changing the baby. Lynne’s sister was at the head end, cooing and shaking the baby’s little hands, that sort of thing, while I did the business. It was a prolonged operation that required an entire change of wardrobe, and towards the end of the procedure I glanced down to see my knob and balls hanging out of the leg of my shorts, all red and crinkly. They had been there for God knows how long. I put myself away as surreptitiously as possible, and Lynne’s sister didn’t seem to have noticed, but that’s the kind of thing where if you don’t say something straight away it never gets mentioned again. I eyed her suspiciously for the rest of the day, but she never gave anything away. She was playing it cool. She left last night, before the rain started.

I Am At The Centre Of A Conspiracy To Part Me From My Cash

Another day, another rejection letter. I now have enough of these to insulate the loft. Today’s was pretty sooky, ‘although I undoubtedly have much to offer’ they will not pursue my application any further and they ‘are sorry to give [me] this disappointing news at this time’. They also thank me for my interest three times. Count them. Three. It could be worse; I got one rejection letter that told me sternly that there were ‘other candidates who more fully fit the job criteria’, which I thought was pretty fucking rude. They might as well have told me I was shit and had done with it.

There was also a letter from the bank. Aw, you fucking bastard. My credit card payment bounced and they are charging me £35, plus £28 unauthorised overdraft fee. They don’t say what the thirty-five quid is for, it’s just some kind of generic fee I suppose. That means that the work I did on Friday, the money from that has gone straight to the bank. They did it again! There is a fiddle that the bank runs and it goes like this. When they take your money it happens instantly, a miracle of modern technology. But when you pay money in it takes up to five working days to clear. By this simple mechanism they fuck you.

‘Judas priest!’ I cry. ‘Forget you, you bunch of forgetful monkey-chuckers!’
I try not to swear in front of the kid, you see.

Well, this isn't happening again. I phone up my credit card and cancel the standing order for the minimum payment. The woman asks me if I have thought about insuring my cards against identity theft. I tell her that anyone can steal my identity if they really want it and good luck to them. If I am late with my credit card that costs me twelve quid, but the bank are waiting to sting me for nearly seventy. Twelve quid, thirty-five quid, these are serious amounts of money when you are unemployed, large enough to worry about, but small enough for you to actually do something about. The fact that if you add up my mortgage and everything I owe a horrendous sum of money, thousands of pounds, is of no consequence. It’s an astronomical figure, it might as well be a round £100,000, or a cool million, because there is absolutely nothing I can do about it right now. I might as well worry that the sun only has enough hydrogen fuel for another 5 billion years. It isn’t real, its the small numbers that get me worked up. I suppose that's where the banks fucked up in the first place.

That said, I would be even angrier about the sweaty, grasping hands of the bank if any of my tax had gone to bail the bank out, but I haven’t really paid any tax for about a year. I can rest easy knowing that the last time I paid any tax they just used it to buy bombs to drop on Afghanistan, so that’s all right.

I explain all this to the baby as I change her. She has been awake most of the night and now Lynne is getting some much-needed sleep. The baby has managed to poo right through all her clothes and bedding, so I am cleaning it up. I say ‘poo’ rather than ‘shit’ because, even though it smells pretty bad and I get it all over my hands, it isn’t really as offensive as my own faeces, and I have had occasion during my long and varied career to find that in some places that I hadn’t fully anticipated. No, ‘shit’ is too harsh a word. Even 'crap' doesn't convey it. 'Poo' is perfect. For the record, the poo started green at the beginning of the week, like pesto with hints of mustard, but has now settled into looking like carrot soup with crushed almonds in it.

So I tell the baby about the iniquities of the banking system. I tell her about money, the little tickets that everyone agrees are necessary for survival on this planet, and how nearly everyone is sick of this game, but everybody has been playing it for so long nobody knows what else to do. She doesn’t seem bothered, as soon as she is clean and in fresh clothes she falls asleep in my arms, pink and warm. I suppose she is right. It doesn’t really matter, does it?

Parenting Advice

A congratulatory email has come flooding in and alongside the well-wishing, there is much information in it that seems pertinent to young parents. I feel that a portion of it bears reproduction here:-

Heard some quality neds on the upstairs of the no.20 the other day. After the usual stuff about picking fights in the town ( every time ah punch som'bidy ma haun hurts), spraying graffetti etc , ned 1 says to ned 2 " ur yous wanting a boy or a girl?"

Ned 2- " ah want a girl so ah can punch her first boyfriend"

Girl ned- " ah just want the wee bastard oot, and am allowed to call it a wee bastard cos we no married".

ned 1 then passed on his experience of parenting , being the father of both Sean and Connor, advising that as children could learn from parents you had to be "heavy cautious wi' the blaw man".

ned 2 then rehearsed how he would coach his child to answer questions about suspicious bruising- " say yi walked intae a door, right, say yi walked intae a door".

So if you had any concerns about parenting rest assured that with competition like that you'll have no worries. Just as long as you are " heavy cautious wi' the blaw".

Thanks for that Michael.

Thoughts on the First Week of Being a Dad

Fatherhood is still setting in. I seem to have a permanent tingle of excitement in my belly, not a huge tingle, just the amount I would have if I was going on a holiday abroad in say, three weeks' time. The child is very cute, I am not sure if I am saying that because I am her dad, and therefore biased, but she did seem considerably better looking than the other babies in the hospital. She has a full head of dark hair, delicate wee features and a little pointy chin, and since she was delivered by c-section she did not come out that black-and-blue way newborns usually do; rather she was pink and pristine. By comparison the other kids were bald and lumpen.

Things are still surprisingly calm in the flat, and I am inclined to think that people who tell you how difficult it is to look after a newborn are painting it blacker than it really is. And you know how people love to tell you horror stories. Best thing is not to listen to other people under any circumstances. The child wakes up two or three times a night, gurning and thrashing her little arms about, and we get up, I check her nappy while Lynne gets herself organised to feed her. Then I go to bed and leave Lynne watching Sign Zone or some other crap late-night telly, baby at her breast. This stage is easier on me than it is on Lynne right enough, I really only get up out of solidarity. In a couple of weeks Lynne will be able to start expressing milk and we can keep it in the fridge, so she can sleep while I feed the baby. Perhaps things are easy so far because breast-feeding has gone so well, and the baby is content. She certainly doesn’t cry much, or for very long when she does.

Still, Lynne is tired all the time. So am I, but not as much as her. She gets a sleep in the afternoons and early evenings when the kid is asleep. As this week has gone on the baby seems to take less milk more often, and if this trend continues it will mean less and less sleep for Lynne. I get the feeling that maybe if the baby was awake more during the day, she might sleep more at night, but at a week old there is not much you can do to keep her awake without making her cry. She is still too little to really know what is going on around her.

At a week old, she cannot focus her eyes and cannot support her head by herself. When I hold her she only seems vaguely aware that I am there. To her my face must be some kind of dim shape looming over her. She is fascinated by the light coming in the window, or by the lamp at night. Light and shadow, that’s it, everything else is a blur. She is disappointed that I don’t have breasts and opens and shuts her mouth against my jumper in vain. She doesn’t mind music and loud voices, but a sudden noise will make her eyes open wide and her arms flail wildly for a moment. I have established two methods of interacting however; she will grab my finger and squeeze it, which is good fun, the other is that when I am rocking her she will lift and lower her chin in anticipation of my movements, in the same way that you move your legs when you are on a swing. Oh, and she likes it when I sing Paul Simon to her. 'The Boy in the Bubble' is her favourite.

Winning Bread

Today I did an honest day’s work. An agency guy phoned me last night to go and count heads in a college in town. They are building new facilities and want to survey how the old ones are used so that they can see what they need. Absolute waste of money, paying me to do what I did today, but it got me out of the house and the guy sounds like he will put more work my way. Hurrah!

I was posted in the unimpressively-named Allan Glenn's Building. I think The Allan Glenn Building has a bit of a better ring to it, but then there's not much you can do with a name like Allan. All day I patrolled the seminar rooms with a clipboard, counting classes full of sports science students who stared back at me with slack-jawed incredulity. Good canteen though, for lunch I had what seemed to be a deep fried sausage roll with a side of tepid beans. I was glad to be finished after eight hours of this, I wanted to get home and cuddle my daughter.

On the way back I bought some lamb chops in Sainsburys to celebrate, and found that I nearly have enough nectar points to get a fiver off my shopping. This is where being unemployed gets you, obsessing about nectar points. This level of spendthriftery is made all the more ridiculous since every so often I crack and buy fags, which I then have to smoke by stealth because Lynne thinks I have quit. You don’t get nectar points on fags either.

Homecoming

Yesterday afternoon my family came home. We had our first night in the house together. Its nice not to be alone in that big empty bed any more, even if it has only been five days. Everything seems to be going smoothly enough, the baby slept at the end of the bed, woke up at 1.30am and then at 5am, I changed her and Lynne fed her each time. Seems that I get the arse end in this deal, while Lynne gets the laughing end. Still, if this turns out to be the routine I reckon I can totally cope with it, but then the baby's lungs have a lot of growing to do.

Today was pretty relaxed as well. Bit tired, but not too bad. My parents came round with cooing and presents. The baby did a poo and so I changed her, but since my folks were watching, she didn't kick me or scream at all. Good girl.

It's odd though. All this time it has seemed like the pregnancy was the whole thing, but now it turns out that that isn't the thing at all. Having the baby is the real thing.

A Diplomatic Incident

I don't know what it is but, from personal experience and three other cases I have observed, there seems to be something about having a first grandchild that somehow makes women really angry. I don’t know if it is because they feel like they are finally losing control of their child, or if they think they should be the centre of attention, or if its just a menopausal thing.

I’ll explain.

Lynne’s mum is cross with me and do you know what? I’m pretty pissed off with her as well. When they moved Lynne from the recovery room down to the ward I went home to get some sleep. On the way I phoned our parents to tell them the baby was born, that both Lynne and the baby were healthy, it was a girl, and the birth weight and time. I left out the grisly details. As far as I was concerned it was nobody else’s bloody business, especially since Lynne was sleeping off the diamorphine and I had been up for two nights straight. I was dog-tired and feeling pretty wrung out and tearful. Neither of us was in any shape to talk to anybody. We had arranged with the grandparents before-hand that they would come and see us after Lynne was home from the hospital, and she could tell them as much as she wanted to then.

I got back to the flat, ate all the bacon in the house with a slice of stale bread and a triangle of Laughing Cow cheese, and went to bed. I meant to only sleep for an hour or so and then go back to he hospital where I was needed, but when I woke it was 2pm. I had slept longer than I meant to so, thinking shit, shit, shit, I had a quick shower and rushed back to the Queen Mum's. I stayed until after nine at night, went home and tried to put some pictures on Facebook but my internet connection kept dropping and I was too tired and cross to work it. I watched some crap telly, drank some milk and went to bed again.

In the morning I checked the phone messages. There were lots of well wishers, which was expected. All day my mobile was filling up with texts as fast as I could delete them. There were also a series of messages from Lynne’s mum, growing increasingly snippy, asking how things were. I don’t know why she thought I would be in the house waiting for her to phone me instead of being in the hospital with my wife and child, but there you are. Among other things, she wanted to know if Lynne had any stitches, and if so, how many. Cheeky cow, I thought. What’s it got to do with you? I didn’t even know how many stitches Lynne has, and I was there when she fucking got them!

When I went to the hospital that day, I told Lynne she had better phone her mum. It was peaceful on the ward, despite the other howling babies, and Lynne was enjoying having no visitors and time to bond with the baby by herself, but she sighed and agreed it was time to let the outside world in. She phoned her mum and told her she had had a c-section. Her mum was pretty clipped on the phone, but that seemed to be that.

An hour later my dad turned up at reception. His eyes were rimmed red and I thought what the fuck is going on here? Lynne’s mum had called my mum in hysterics. Had Lynne had a blood transfusion? What hospital was she in? I was keeping the truth from her! I was hiding things! Then she slammed the phone down. When I heard this I was absolutely fucking raging. So that’s how I told my dad about the c-section, standing in the hospital lobby among all the crappy plastic seats with a fuzzy telly burbling from a bracket on the wall beside us. My dad said that my mum was ok, just a bit bemused, but that he wanted to warn me before things got out of control.

Unfortunately, I can’t just fall out with my mother-in-law. I’m not allowed. That night I went round to Doctor P’s house to use his computer. I emailed all the pictures I had taken of the kid to Lynne’s folks and then phoned them up. I let Lynne’s mum tell me off and hang up on me. Doctor P said ‘Aye, whenever something good happens, there always seems to be someone who just has the knack of spoiling it.’ I laughed a lot at this. It was exactly what I needed. Lynne folks drove down the next day, and at visiting time they came in to see the baby. Lynne’s mum was glassy-eyed, her smile fixed on her face, but when she saw Lynne and the child she snapped out of it. Nothing was said about what had happened. We all played nice.

I phoned my mum to tell her the crisis seemed to have been averted. She said that when I had put her off from visiting the hospital, at first she had suspected that it was because Lynne wanted her parents to see the baby first.

Christ Almighty, I thought. Don't you start.

No Fireworks After All

We were in the ward until about half seven. Lynne dozed on the bed but I could tell she wasn't asleep because every couple of minutes she would toggle the TENS boost button. I sat by the bed trying to do the sudoku in Take A Break!, but I couldn't even do the easy one. I had Lynne's dinner, I wasn't supposed to, the food is ONLY FOR PATIENTS, but Lynne was too wasted to eat. It was canteen roast beef and tatties, anemic with salty gravy. Mmm. There is nothing quite like canteen food, a friend of mine once said that you can't make macaroni cheese like they do in a canteen. You make it too good yourself. And canteen lasagne and chips, come on, admit it. You love it.

At seven thirty the midwife came and checked her again. I went out and paced in the corridor. Then the midwife came back out and said, 'It looks like your wife's going to have a baby really soon!' I had begun to relax over the afternoon, but now things were happening again. The midwife went to get a wheelchair while I stopped Lynne from putting her jeans back on. Easier said than done, she was still under the effects of the diamorphine and was insisting on being fully dressed at all times.

The labour suite is on the third floor, small blue rooms, hot enough to send you to sleep if it wasn't for the adrenalin. The midwives work twelve hour shifts and were just changing over as we turned up, so we got a fresh one, Kirsten. We plugged in an mp3 player to listen to some music, we weren't supposed to use stuff that hadn't been checked by the hospital technician, but we decided we would just say we did plugged it in when no one was looking. They are closing the hospital in nine weeks anyway.

And then things slowed down again. Lynne was still getting regular contractions, but she still wasn't fully dilated. So there we were in the labour suite, Lynne on the gas and air, Kirsten writing up her notes and checking the baby's heartbeat, me drinking the hospital coffee, which tastes exactly like flat cola when its cold. We listened to Elbow, then Ben Harper, then Beth Orton. Out in the corridor you could smell cordite and see the fireworks bursting over Govan and Partick. It got closer and closer to midnight, and there was still no sign of the baby.

Lynne chuffed her way though an entire tank of gas and air and they had to get her a new one. Midnight came and went and it wasn't until 2 in the morning that she started getting the urge to push. By this time Lynne was absolutely exhausted, and I watched helplessly while she strained to push with each contraction. I hadn't realised this before, but apparently pushing is only useful during a contraction, and Lynne was so tired by this time that her contractions were slowing down. Even worse, the midwife suspected that the baby was the wrong way round, trying to come out chin first.

Suddenly, even though it was 4am, the place was full of people all doing stuff. The registrar came in and talked about trying to turn the baby with forceps, but if he couldn't then Lynne would have to go to the theatre for a caesarean. Lynne only wanted to know if she would feel anything, she was exhausted and had given up on any ideas of keeping control over what happened to her body. She just wanted it over with.

They couldn't get in with the forceps, so they took Lynne to the operating theatre. I wasn't allowed in until the anaesthetist had given Lynne a spinal, which would numb her bottom half completely. I changed into scrubs and sat outside in the shabby corridor, too tired to be terrified, just dully wondering what could go wrong next. A doctor came up the corridor, eyes bloodshot, and told me they would get me soon as the anaesthetist had finished. Then she yawned a massive yawn.

Finally they came and got me. Lynne lay on a table the middle of the room, her arms and legs pinned out like starfish, with a green screen across her chest so that, when I sat on the stool next to her head, I couldn't see what was going on. Lynne looked happier than she had for hours. 'You look very handsome in your scrubs,' she said. 'This is just like ER, if ER was in 1982.' After ten minutes of activity on the other side of the screen, there was a strangled, gurgling squawl. Lynne and I looked at each other. And that's how my daughter was born.

Birthday Fireworks?

You read all the books and you go to all the classes but you still don’t have any idea what its actually going to be like.

We got back to the Queen Mum’s about two in the afternoon of the 5th, and waited in triage while the staff ran around after a girl who had had an asthma attack when she went into labour. She was behind a curtain, making a horrible noise, while people wheeled gas cylinders in and out. Lynne didn’t make a so much as a whimper, she just stood by the bed and when she had a contraction she would press the boost button on the TENS machine, tip her head and close her eyes until it passed. As always in moments of crisis my bodily functions had come to the fore and I was desperate for a piss, but I didn’t want to leave her.

After what can’t have been more than twenty minutes but felt like hours the midwife came to check Lynne over, and I headed for the toilet. If the Queen Mum’s maternity unit has any failing it is that there is only one gent’s, and it is way back at the entrance. As the night wore on and we progressed deeper and deeper into the building, it became more and more of a mission to get there, my bladder’s insistence constantly being balanced against being needed where I was and the length of the journey.

When I got back Lynne was going to be admitted to the ward until she was a bit further on. The midwife said she would check her again in two hours. Lynne had been in labour for nearly twelve hours now and was in a lot of pain. She hadn’t been convinced by the TENS machine at first, but now that the contractions were getting stronger it seemed to be having more effect. Even so, she had decided to have a shot of diamorphine. I was glad; it isn’t often that I have seen Lynne in that much pain and it just made me want to make it go away. Or hurt someone. I hated it.

I grabbed our bags; Lynne’s handbag, my bag, Lynne’s bag of clothes, the bag of baby clothes and blankets and Lynne’s coat, and then stumbled after her into the ward. There was space for four beds, but we shared the room with only one other girl. She had a pink dressing gown and a bammy family who sat around eating crisps and swearing. We drew the curtain around the bed and Lynne got her shot. She was still in a lot of pain and was only comfortable standing, but after about ten minutes she leaned against me, closed her eyes and let me lower her onto the bed. She kissed my neck. That’ll be the morphine, I thought.

‘This is a big adventure,’ she said, her pupils like pinpricks. ‘You’re my Sherpa. What was his name?’
‘Tensing,’ I said.
‘I always felt sorry for him. He was the one who took them up the mountain. I bet he did it himself all the time, in an afternoon.’

I’m not sure that he did.

It's A Girl!

Just a couple of words because I am wrecked. I have a daughter as of six o'clock this morning, and both her and her mother are fine, they've spent most of the day sleeping off the diamorphine. I had a wee nap about midday, but apart from that I have been awake for the past forty hours so the gruesome details can wait until tomorrow.

Bricking It, Big Style.

But then freaking out is my job at this point. Last night I went round to Jeff's to watch the football. I had 4 beers and smoked a couple of rollies, which I really shouldn't have done, because Lynne woke me at 4am to tell me her contractions had started. My mouth tastes like shit and I have cleaned my teeth 3 times today already. Pineapples and raspberry leaf tea work like a fucking dream it seems.

Lynne had been up since 3.15, and had been meticulously noting down the time and duration of each contraction. If we had thought sooner we could have had a spreadsheet, she says. I hooked her up to the TENS machine, which was a bit of a struggle coz she wouldn't keep her hands out of the way while I stuck the pads to her back. Then I took her back to bed, but she couldn't really lie down comfortably, so I made her a little nest of pillows. She dozed off here and there through the night, but we kept up with the list, including anotations of when I went back to bed.

In the morning I nipped out to get some milk and a paper, for something to do more than anything else. I bought blue-top milk instead of green and didn't notice until I was putting it into the fridge. Lynne is a bit pale, feels a bit sick, but seems ok. The contractions are starting to hurt a lot now.

About 10.30 I phone Jeff and he gave us a lift to the hospital. Lynne's contractions are 5 minutes apart and lasting for about a minute each time, but they had been pretty much since 5 this morning. But the midwife reckoned Lynne was only 2-3cm dilated and sent us home! That's where we are now, we are going back in a couple of hours.

Unleashing My Inner Pedant

Pregnant women at full term are often described as being ‘hot and bothered.’ You ask an expectant father how his other half is and this is the reply, ‘Oh, she’s feeling a bit hot and bothered, she just wants it over with.’ ‘Hot and bothered’ in this case seems to be a euphemism for being a sweaty, bloated, red-faced, screaming monster. Lynne is not ‘hot and bothered’; rather she is ‘glowing.’

Reading through yesterday’s post I realise that far from sounding unconcerned I seemed to be verging on moderately-concerned-to-slightly-hysterical. My apologies, concern is not the aim of this blog. Lynne is healthy and happy, ‘glowing’ as I said, and the baby still has room to kick about. But we still want to avoid having her induced if we can help it. The free book from the hospital Ready, Steady, Baby! contains only 3 lines on inducing pregnancy. This could mean that, hey, there’s nothing to it, but it seems more likely to me that they couldn’t think of anything good to say about induction so they left it out. Your Pregnancy Bible is more forthright, mentioning vaginal tablets and gels, and also a ’25-cm (10-inch) long plastic instrument with an end like a crochet hook.’ Mmm, maybe give that a miss, thanks all the same.

So, with that in mind, today’s mission was to find a pineapple and some raspberry leaf tea. Curry for tea tonight, and possibly a bit of nipple tweaking, but Lynne says this is too silly. Old wives’ tales are the way forward, no matter that this article says they are just myths. What the hell does the Telegraph know anyway? It’s a right-wing comicbook!

The pineapple was no problem, but just try finding some raspberry leaf tea in Glasgow. Every shop and supermarket has some kind of raspberry flavoured tea, but made out of dried fruit or some silly shit. Now, I like a herbal tea as much as the next hippy, but you don’t make tea out of fruit. You make juice out of fruit. Juice not tea. (I would allow banana tea though, because as any pedant knows, a banana is a herb).

I was getting quite cross, it was raining and everything, but I kept my cool. I have a rule never to moan at people who work in shops, since I worked in shops myself for so long, and I have stuck to that rule, even that time in Iceland when the girl tried to tell me creme fraiche was just a posh name for cottage cheese. I finally tracked down the tea in Napiers on Byres road, a wee packet of spongy green leaves for the reasonable sum of Fucking Hell! I mean £4.50.

The girls in Napiers are very helpful. Aparently the curry thing is nothing to do with fenugreek, which I had a vague idea it was, but is all about the spices stimulating something and getting the bowels moving. It's important to keep the bowels open. Lovely. Pineapple is meant to help release some hormone in the cervix that brings on labour. The girl steps closer to me and lowers her voice. I'll not shout this across the shop, she says, but sperm has the same effect on the cervix.

Interesting.

'Get Your Godamn Hands Off My Membranes!'

Another appointment at the hospital. The baby is now four days past its due date and, apart from a couple of twinges in the night, the little fella seems happy kicking about in Lynne’s belly. There is still room to move in there, for now. The midwife checks Lynne’s blood pressure and we listen to the heartbeat. It sounds like a train. Healthy. Spontaneous labour could start at any time.

The midwife offers Lynne a membrane sweep to hurry things along. Lynne politely declines and the midwife agrees that she would probably leave it too. It is only effective 35-40% of the time and if Lynne is still comfortable and we are in no rush.... However, if spontaneous labour doesn’t start in the next week or so then somebody is going to have to go in and get the baby. Thank Christ that I’m a guy; my bits are simple, I don’t have to put up with all the indignities and minor infections that come with a furry front bum. Men are only required to show their tackle to medical staff in extreme cases of absolute fucking disaster. Have a look at this picture, detailing the measurement of fundal height during pregnancy:

See? Awful. I think you will agree there is something disturbingly callous about this open-palmed insertion. The words 'full bladder' also seem particularly unsympathetic. I think this diagram comes from more primitive times, when women were thrown on their backs, had their muffs shaved and their feet shoved into stirrups, while a doctor yanked the baby out with a cruelly gleaming pair of forceps. Ahhhh, the 70s. Those were the days.

Lynne has escaped such horrors so far, but the baby needs to move fast if she is going to get away unscathed.

Quote of the Day

Well, quote of Friday actually. We are walking down the street when Lynne says,

'Imagine if it was your job to audition cute puppies for adverts!'

and then looks delighted that she thought of it.



This is what that would be like:

'Yes.'

'Yes.'

'No, no, NO!'

Demonstrating Bullshit Level 1, with SPECIFIC examples

The job search continues. I am currently wrestling with a Competency based application form for some crappy admin job. Reading the hefty Competency Framework Booklet that comes with the application pack I have reached the conclusion that it is a management consultant’s heaven and a jobseeker’s hell.

Let me explain. In the Olden Days there would be a bit on an application form that said:

‘Use this space to explain how your skills and blah blah blah meet the job spec blah blah. (Continue on a separate sheet if necessary).’

In the modern world this is obviously no use, it needs to be much more complicated. This is where Key Competencies come in. Instead of writing a spiel about yourself you have to identify the Key Competencies for the role and provide an example of a time when you were Competent. There are usually about five Competencies in each job, like Communicating or Initiative, so you have to come up with times when you Communicated or Initiatized (I know that is not a word).

Keeping up so far? Good. Well, depending on the Grade Band of the job, the Level of the required Key Competency changes. This is shown by different Positive and Negative Indicators for each Level of each Key Competency. A Level 3 Positive Indicator might be to ‘understand what might happen if something is not done in time’, so assumedly Levels 1 and 2 don’t need to bother about what happens if something isn’t done in time. See? So if the Competencies are:

Communicating Level 3
Decision Making Level 1

This means that they want a bullshitter who doesn’t know what he is doing. On the other hand:

Communicating Level 1
Decision Making Level 3

Means that they wants someone who knows what to do, but doesn’t know how to tell anybody about it.

Still not sure? Well, here is a handy table from the Competencies Framework Booklet that should make it all crystal fucking clear: