Saturday, and the perennial Diarist’s Difficulty that absolutely nothing worth cataloguing ever happens on a Saturday.
We usually get up in the very late morning, but on this occasion we were up considerably earlier than we would have liked to be, on account of Ritalin Boy, who started our day with a crash when he tiptoed into our room and knocked a glass of blackcurrant juice over my treasured wool carpet. After that mostly we just go to work.
Today we took turns to sleep in shifts during the morning, looking after him and taking Lucy to work and making packed lunches and cleaning cars out. Mark did the worst of it.
Once Lucy came home from the Chinese after lunch I left Ritalin Boy in her care and went to work. She had extracted promises of large sums of money from me in return for childcare, for which I could hardly blame her, it was well earned.
Once on the peaceful haven of the taxi rank I indulged in holiday daydreams. We are speculating about the possibility of going to France at half term in October, once there are no tourists here and we have saved some money up.
We like France very much, lived there for a while and Oliver was born there, a detail in which he takes great pride and which astounds his French teacher, who finds it remarkable that it was possible for him to live there for so long and yet absorb almost completely nothing: but he has a French birth certificate, and could, if he wished, claim French nationality.
His birth was one of the more remarkable events in our joint history, so since nothing much happened today I will fill in the gap with the story, leaving out any medical or biological details because a) that sort of thing is entirely unnecessary in a piece of writing which doesn’t have aspirations to finish up in a women’s Chat magazine, and b) I have forgotten them.
Some months into my pregnancy I decided that I had been poked and punctured and looked at more than enough, and that having a baby should not be an event which required extensive medical support. France is a better place to have a baby than the UK, because in France it doesn’t at all hurt pregnant women to eat shellfish and unpasteurised cheese, and red wine and coffee are positively encouraged. This splendid piece of evolutionary good fortune makes it a much nicer place to be pregnant, even for English women, and I can recommend it.
However, they are quite keen on sticking needles in you, and looking curiously at the baby with large scanners, and after a couple of months of this I decided that I had had enough of the health service. Mark had been a farmer for years before I met him, and I thought that this was a reasonable grounding in the mechanics of childbirth, after all, one does not look for lambs under gooseberry bushes, and babies are not that different.
Even then we had been married long enough for him not to raise pointless objections. It was the very earliest days of the wonder of the unspeakably brilliant World Wide Web, and so it wasn’t possible to find out how it was done by looking online, and being abroad we didn’t really have any access to English Do It Yourself Childbirth books. Eventually a friend lent us a truly awful book called Spiritual Midwifery, which we never remembered to return, full of all sorts of drivel about being able to recognise stages of labour by looking at the intensity of the mother’s aura: but with a wonderful chapter at the end written by a real doctor, which said something along the lines of, “Don’t do this at home. Really don’t. Look, all right, if you are that stupid, here’s what you have got to know in order not to accidentally kill yourself or your baby,” – followed by the Haynes Manual of female childbirth.
We read it from cover to cover, and by the time Oliver was born considered ourselves to be experts, much to the irritation of the local hospital, who disagreed but lacked the authority to arrest me and insist that I attended a labour ward like any good Frenchwoman.
So we did it all by ourselves at home, and apart from some difficulty with clumsy use of string around the umbilical cord, it all went splendidly, if messily, if you decide to do this yourselves I suggest plenty of plastic sheets and disposable towels. Fortunately we didn’t have a carpet but the floorboards were never the same again. We thought that it was all an awful lot of fuss about nothing.
We never found out how much he weighed. We had a go at weighing him in a string bag from a balance thing that Mark used for weighing scrap iron, but it didn’t really work. Also we had to call the doctor afterwards because we needed more evidence than just the presence of a baby to get a birth certificate. She wrote a letter confirming that he was indeed a baby and charged us twenty Euros, which we thought was expensive considering we had done all the work and the clearing up.
So there you go, we have lots of very happy and unusual memories of France, and you have hardly noticed that today has been so utterly without event that I didn’t have anything to tell you and have handily filled in the gap with a jolly anecdote.
I will try again tomorrow.
