Written from 2000, Thursday 27th April 2006

The train this morning turned into a nightmare. No delays (no they saved that one for this evening!), rather it was me causing all the trouble. Get on with my large steaming cup of coffee (bought from the stand on Platform 1, Cardiff Central, as it tastes better than the BR sludge – although not much!), plus handbag and computer case. I noticed that the coffee was dripping a bit, but I thought I’d merely dislodged the lid somehow. Had I fuck. The side seam of the cup was coming apart for some bizarre reason, and as I put it on the table, coffee started running everywhere. Being completely British, I picked the cup back up off the table, apologising all the way and headed for the buffet. By the time I got there, I had about half a cup of coffee left, which the helpful man decanted into a BR cup for me. This left me and half a rain-forest of serviettes to go black and clean up the table and wipe the floor of the buffet (which was stinking dirty and given I was on the 0755, I can only imagine that not much cleaning had been done overnight). More apologising and smiling to fellow passengers and a slight flushing around the gills!

Best thing, I thought, is put your head down, get on with some work and don’t meet anyone else’s eyes for the rest of the journey and this plan worked until I was the other side of Reading and putting things back in my case. As I got my bag out from behind the seat, and was manoeuvring, I managed to step on a poor woman’s toes. She gave out such a yelp of surprise, I’m sure the whole carriage heard! More apologies and another flushed face for me.

Head for the loo, I thought, regain your composure and then sit down and try not to do anything else that makes you stand out from the crowd. Poise back, I settled back into my seat for the last few minutes journey into Paddington. Then my fatal error; I’d put my watch, with my rings attached into my handbag when I took them off the night before and decided that this was the best time to put them on – ready for the working day. Of course, as I yanked my watch out of my bag (it had become caught around a CD case which was inexplicably in there as well?), it somehow became undone spraying my rings across the carriage. More flushing, on my knees by now in the aisle trying to find my eternity ring (which was under the shoe of the woman I had stood on earlier!), and the burning desire to get off this train to hell as quickly as possible.

The way back has been nowhere as eventful. We’re running about 30 minutes late, but that kind of goes with the territory.

Written from 0800, Thursday 27th April 2006

Anna Pickard in today’s Guardian talks about eating. More specifically eating with one’s mouth open sharing with all and sundry the sight of semi-macerated food stuff getting trapped between your teeth, whilst espousing the theories of Marx (or in most peoples case arguing that Jane would no more be attracted to Ian as well as Grant than to Hitler and Churchill – but that’s another matter). However, if, like me, you get to participate in more than your fair share of business dinners and lunches – whether buffet-style or full sit down, black tie hell – talking to colleagues whilst deftly munching on a piece of asparagus does become an issue.

In one of my earliest encounters with the business lunch, I ordered a spaghetti dish, which, whilst no doubt delicious, went back to the kitchen hardly touched. Cardinal rule number 1; if, whilst dining alone, you would normal tie a tea-towel around your neck to form a make-shift bib to eat something (and spaghetti and I have a love/hate relationship, especially where white tops are concerned) don’t order it. I once watched a very eminent person (or so he thinks, having the title “Sir”) take a small, silver clip from his jacket pocket just before a meal and spend the entire address (by another worthy person – who is one day aspiring to add the word “Sir” to his title) fiddling with it and his napkin. By the time he managed to attach it between the second and third buttons of his formal shirt, I was transfixed. However, once the tomato soup arrived and his eating habits were exposed, I wasn’t just aware why all this fussing had been necessary, but also rather glad to be concentrating on something – anything – else.

So, you learn. You stop looking for things on the menu that you enjoy and rather pick out those which are easy to eat. This is more difficult, I think if you are vegetarian. Invariably, a menu will include a couple of dishes which are suitable for you, but they will include a pasta dish (see above), a risotto or couscous dish (little bits that get stuck between your teeth – never attractive) and, possibly a plate of vegetables in some kind of sauce, which will be dribbling down your top before you can shout “Jamie Oliver”!

Snacks are no easier. In the world where a sandwich has to be bursting at the seams and come with enough “accompaniments” to necessitate a huge dinner style plate to hold it, eating light has become perhaps more trying than 5 courses. Soup, no matter whether it’s thin or thick, brings with it the possibility of drippage and even the humble salad, now it’s bathed in dressing, becomes a nightmare, whether during lunch or later when you are attempting to get that spot of olive oil out of your new blouse – already knowing that it’ll never look the same and is probably ruined.

Before I went off on that tangent I did start out thinking about eating habits. Putting aside the eminent Sir, who also has an appalling habit of addressing your breasts and becoming so inebriated by the end of an evening that he forgets where he is (and that trousers have a fly!), generally people do maintain a certain level of decorum when eating in public. However, there is a gender difference in my experience, with men more happy to put their heads down, ignore the conversation and make sure they fill their boots. Women seem to pick at their food, ensuring that conversation is maintained (mostly with other women around the table, who are also only then able to pick at their food). It’s possibly one of the last great barriers in business – which will only be broken when women actually admit that a few lettuce leaves (“no dressing, please”) and a spoonful of a raspberry mousse does not leave them so over-stuffed that they’ll “have to spend all day tomorrow in the gym!”. But, that could just be me!

In a society, as Anna points out, where we are asked to multi-task, run from one meeting to the next and generally burn ourselves out by the time we hit 40, is it any wonder that the small matter of stopping (and shutting up) during the times we are meant to be eating has become almost impossible for some. I was raised never to eat (or smoke – but that’s another matter) on the street. It was considered slovenly and, in my mother’s words “common”.

Tangent Alert! Mum has always been big on things that are – or are not – common. Indeed, I could write a book not only on this, but also on her “Barnstable Sayings”, which I’ll share another day. However, eating on the street was high on her list (she’s 73 today, by the way and I’m not only in London for meetings but not getting back before the 9.00pm curfew when she’ll be preparing for bed, so, for some inexplicable reason, she can be up by 7.15am the following day!).

However, eating on the street, eating on public transport and, for the drivers out there, eating in the car are now all common-place. I have no problem with this apart from when the food is especially fragrant. There is nothing like the agonies experienced when, on the late train from London to Cardiff, someone gets on with a steaming pizza, which infuses the whole carriage and you are left with nothing more than a British Rail sandwich. We all have to live. We all have to eat. Would I prefer that everyone had the time to sit and eat with a metal knife, fork and spoon from a china plate? Of course, but this isn’t reality, rather a harking back to a previous age, where a woman would be at home preparing the meal from first thing in the morning to when her husband rolled in (probably after the pub) some twelve hours later.

So, next time you’re sitting down in a restaurant or picking up a sandwich from M&S, remember putting smaller portions in your mouth, which can be consumed more easily, is the way forward. Oh, and that wrapper, can, carton or packet – for all our sakes, find a bin!

For those of you in the area, top of page 5 today:

Steelman fights for his life after falling onto hot slag at 4.30am

I presume the headline writer didn’t notice the possibility of that being read one of two ways. I wonder who pointed it out?

Just as an aside - and because you lot are smarter than me - if a man has an affair, the other party is called his “mistress”. What does the woman call him?

Answers below, please.

I’ve managed something I was beginning to believe impossible - a lost weekend. Not in the old-fashioned sense of course - I mean, it’s a very, very long time since I’d go to a house-party on a Friday night and not think straight until the alarm went off on Monday morning - but in a way that I was doing in my early-thirties.

Weekends now are about doing “fun” things with the small man (and the OH when he’s around), shopping, cleaning and getting a take-away on a Saturday night, whilst watching Sky’s movie of the week (or alternatively some crappy pseudo-American programming that, if you flick away from, you cannot remember either it’s name, it’s plot-line or the channel you were watching). This weekend was about drinking wine on Friday night, sitting in the pub on Saturday watching the FA Cup Semi-Final and then not making it home until gone 3.30am and today. Well, today’s been about lying around whichever part of the house I’m in swearing on all things unholy that I’m never drinking and smoking that much again in one evening. I even managed to run out of cigarettes and be that drunk that I bought more - at £5.00 for 16 - from my Local’s cigarette machine.

Talking of the Local, things have changed recently. A new owner has brought with her new front windows (which let in the light rather than just retaining all the cigarette smoke from the last 20 years), new upholstery, new flooring and, most excitingly of all to some of the blokes I know a flush system urinal and soap in the gents! I mean, hi-tech or what? However, what it’s also brought is a new juke-box. A much more entertaining one, with touch-screen technology and some great tunes (The Killers were on rather a lot - and to the rest of the pub, I can only apologise!). It houses some incredibly bad pop songs as well, however. Somewhere late into the evening as I and the Man with No Arse continued in our quest to obliterate the few remaining brain cells we have left, someone put on the Spitting Image tune about the chicken, which I thought died with the programme. Most annoyingly, I could also remember the words! How does that happen?

The great thing about being in the pub for that long is the topics of conversation get more and more bizarre. It started quite respectably, with myself and the Manc Scum discussing football, music, the relative merits of Bristol versus Dudley Zoo and his recent trip to Gog Land. By the end of the evening - when others joined the conversation and had to play alcohol catch-up - we’d moved to power tools, the NHS (always a perennial subject of “..and another thing why the hell can’t they..” comments), wooden toy parties and house moves. I suddenly realised I was entering middle-age!

The wooden toy party was my fault. I went on Thursday night, as it appears to be the type of thing women with children do. There was also the promise of wine, so you know me, open a bottle and I’ll make sure I‘m on time! The only problem was the woman doing the selling. There is only so many times you can listen to someone talk about the wonderful qualities of having enough wood in your life after imbibing several glasses of red before thoughts turn to smut. When she also added that having wood in your mouth was never an issue as it had anti-bacterial properties I swear I nearly choked. I spent the rest of the talk hidden behind a catalogue, desperately trying not to catch the eye of anyone else in the room. All the “buy it at home” parties I’d been to in the past where wood was mentioned to that extent had ended with me buying some sex toy or other. I left this one with several jigsaws and a shape-sorter. How things change.

Still wondering whether any of my brain cells are going to come out to play by the time I reach work tomorrow. In the interim, I’ll be singing the following..

“Hold a chicken in the air
Stick a deckchair up your nose
Buy a jumbo jet
And then bury all your clothes
Paint your left knee green
Then extract your wisdom teeth
Form a string quartet
And pretend your name is Keith”

Now you try and get that out of your brain!

Some of the more loyal amongst you (and I know you are out there) may remember that during the early days, when I was stuck at home enjoying my maternity leave with a very small William, I had a real rant about Tesco’s and their advertising (for those of you who haven’t read the complete back catalogue - and shame on you - you can catch up here)*.

Anyway, in my reading around the blogsphere, I’ve noticed that Gert is having issues with labelling at the same store (read the latest here. I can’t believe that something is marked vegetarian and then contains fish! On a related point, there is much vexation over at The Coven inhabited by Mr and Mrs Blue Witch (again, find the latest here dated Wednesday, April 12 2006 and headed “Question: When is a vegetarian not a vegetarian?”) on the self same issue.

Tesco, as a multi-national company, are in a position where they don’t have to worry if a couple of people object either to the advertising they run or the labelling policies they adopt. However, the company’s complete inability to accept that perhaps they are wrong is staggering, moreso as they are not following the latest Food Standards Agency (FSA) guidance (see Mr Blue Witch’s excellent correspondence once again). Surely, the FSA should be following this up and making the appropriate enquiries. As we aren’t in the position to speak to the right people - you try getting past the customer services/complaints department of a company like Tesco’s and you’ll get the picture (I remember my war with 3G too well!) - it’s the job of this body to do it for us.

I don’t do any regular shopping in Tesco’s, so I find it difficult to make an impact (although I will be mentioning this the next time I meet my friends Mother, who works for them). I actually chose to use the little newsagents and pay more for my cigarettes when I’m stuck in Cardiff Bay. If you do nothing else today, chose to remove your custom from Tesco’s and take it elsewhere instead.

Rant over.

* - I know my views on shopping on-line have changed since I wrote this. I’ve come around to the idea that one van making a journey must be better than 10 cars (or possibly more) making individual journeys to the same place. Instead of spending my time shopping (which used to take a couple of hours, post William), I now spend it interacting with the human race in a myriad of other - and more intellectually profitable - ways. Do you know the latest information on rails for infant beds? Neither would I if I hadn’t been chatting for several hours last Sunday!

As I know My Dear Friend cannot live without daily updates on the great man, hats off to Nate for setting up his latest venture - a site dedicated to all things Morrissey.

If nothing else, pop across to Nate’s site and check out what happens when you crawl in from the pub at 3am and have access to all the latest technology. I’m sometimes so glad I’m a Luddite! The video had me chuckling to myself, if nothing else with the knowledge that we’ve all been there, but most of us have not had a video camera trained on us (or if we have, been brave enough to publish it!).

.. an experiment (courtesy of the friendly Evolters) that even I would have funded. Cake baking substituting chicken eggs with Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. Sure he was missing a control and only attempted it once, but I salute the attempt!

On another note, completely unrelated but I’m feeling a bit “tangenty” this evening, the guy who has basically built the system I’ve been getting the plaudit’s for in work is getting married tomorrow. He’s also had no luck in finding this site. Jake, I’m throwing you a clue!

Back to earth with a bump over the last few days. Swish London hotels that charge £5.50 for a cup of coffee (I dread to think what the bar tabs the night before came to!) are behind me for a little while, at least. The presentation of the project I have been working on so hard for the last six months went well and I’ve been asked to handle the roll-out and training, as well as putting in place some ideas for Phase 2 (I’m thinking podcasting, e-rooms and the like - I think the Board are thinking minor tweaks!).

Anyway, the Other Half is away tonight for a business dinner of his own. That means its just me and William (or “the boy who drinks talcum powder” as he will be known for a while. I know they say his mother will drink anything, but I think even I may draw the line!) tonight, with some left over pizza and my finger on the remote. I’m quite looking forward to a night on my own (although I spent ages last night on the new system - as well as chatting on IM), to do with as I will.

What else? Well, it’s just started raining (and I’m sure there was washing on the line this morning!), but that shouldn’t be too much of a shock. Think I might have got caught by a police speed trap this morning - but we’ll have to wait and see. Other than that, all’s quiet and I can’t say I’m bothered at all!

Written Wednesday 5th April 2006

This is, quite possibly, the longest post ever posted on this site. It’s about child-birth and therefore those who don’t want to know about placental delivery may wish to look away now. In all seriousness I’m exaggerating the gore element, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you!

On my way to London this morning, I decided to take a look at the Guardian before I settled into my working day. I was interested in the headlines on G2 surrounding Louise Wener’s article on motherhood (“What’s so bad about being a mother?”). I was even more intrigued by the article itself. Whilst I’m obviously delighted that Louise is finding life with her 6 month old daughter such a blast, I’m not sure she’s in the same boat as the mother’s I meet up with on a regular basis. She certainly is no reflection of me.

Being an ex-pop star and currently a writer (which she says offers her “a level of autonomy and freedom”), she is I’m sure, not weighed down by the daily grind of having to go into an office or, when the grind isn’t daily, the plain difficulty, some days, of remembering where you – and your child – are supposed to be and with what bag of paraphernalia. Similarly, she is not burdened, like some of my friends who have become full-time mothers, with the constant struggles with money and retaining a life outside of their child.

I’m lucky that I have a job that I love and a boss who gives me a certain level of freedom with my hours (as long as the work is done). However, this doesn’t mean that I wake up some mornings at 6.30 to the sound of William already awake in his cot and wish that the next hour and a half of my day wasn’t going to happen. I long for the days when I can shower without having to listen to the destruction taking place in William’s room. As much as possible, there is nothing within grabbing distance of his cot, but its amazing how long little arms can get when the prize of a block to throw (or recently a 2p piece with which to scrawl on the walls) is just out of reach.

There is the fight between looking presentable for the office (never one of my strongest points even before William came on the scene) and keeping William entertained. In the early days, when he wasn’t as mobile, I’d be able to put him in our room whilst I dressed and did my hair. These days, he has to be kept in his cot. Otherwise, he’s down the stairs, up the stairs or chasing a cat around the house before you can say “blow-dry”.

Once I’ve (usually semi-) achieved my own morning routine, William has to be washed, his teeth brushed and clothed. Believe me, this sounds easier than it is (as quickly as a sock is put on it can be removed and heaved across the room). However, manage it we do and before long I’m bellowing “hold the wall” as he careers off towards the stairs (like a military boot-camp, William spends some of his time with both hands on a wall, spread-eagled and without the mental capacity to work out how to move backwards or forwards. Hopefully this isn’t a sign of things to come!). Once downstairs it’s out to the car, which is usually parked across the road, a fight to contain William in his seat and a short journey across town to his child-minders (who is back now, at least. For four months, William’s care was split across four houses each working week – excluding our own – when just getting to the right place at the right time became a trial in itself), with whom I have to make small talk before the blessed moment I can get back into the car and start my day, properly.

The next few days are particularly problem filled. Today, I had to be on the 0855 from Cardiff, so the OH took William to my mothers at 0700, she then dropped him the child-minders at 0800 and I got a lift to the station. Tonight, my mother will collect William from the child-minders at 1700, Scott will retrieve him at about 1730 (and take him to visit his great-grandfather in his new care home) before coming into town at 1900 to pick me up from the station. Tomorrow, I will drop William at the child-minders before 0800, drive into my office in Cardiff, get a bus from the Bay to the train station and then get the 0925 to London. I have to stay in London overnight, so in the evening my mother will again collect William and Scott will pick up from hers. On Friday, Scott will drop William at 0700 at my mothers, who will take him to the child-minders. All being well, I’ll be around by 1700 to collect him, but who knows! Some people compare this to a military operation – I think it’s logistically probably more difficult as I’m not allowed to carry a gun or order anyone to do anything. Needless to say my negotiating skills are improving rapidly.

For other friends, the routines are more complicated even than this. At least my child-minder is in the same town – and not a 30 minute drive away (a journey at least one of my friends makes, before her return 45 minute commute to work). Others stay at home to care for their own child, but it doesn’t make the problems any less. They may not have to get out at a certain time every day, but they have competing priorities, either trying to balance the books by buying cheaper food and spending ages making it into something presentable, or beating themselves up because they are about to serve up oven chips and fish fingers for the second time that week. If you stay at home with a child it’s taken for granted that they will eat better (organically?), be entertained with constant finger-painting and walks in the country and your home will look like something out of a catalogue. However, reality for most couldn’t be further from the truth.

For those of you without children, I’m sure you can suggest a million solutions, from getting up earlier, being more prepared, stapling William to the wall or simply walking out. However, those we haven’t already tried, if they aren’t in place, you can guarantee there’s a bloody good reason why not. I’ve always been a night-bird and would rather spend an extra hour at night organising and achieve morning sanity than the current situation.

However, none of this means I don’t love William and don’t enjoy being with him. Certainly there are days (last Saturday was one of them) when I am delighted when he goes to bed and I can finally have 5 minutes to myself. But before this, I’ll have shared with him something that makes him delighted – whether that’s seeing the new piglets at the local farm or a stick that for some reason is the best thing since sliced bread! The new eyes William has given me – diminishing the cynic inside me, for at least the time I’m with him – is something that I will be forever grateful.

Louise also talks about bonding with her little girl through breast-feeding, eulogising about the first opportunity she had to do this, pulling herself up whilst still receiving a blood transfusion and without a nurse to assist. I’m glad that it’s something she was able to do and obviously finds great pleasure in. I wasn’t that lucky, with William taking one look at my not insubstantial breasts and deciding feeding from a bottle was better than possible suffocation (on a less trite note, he was actually fed through a nose tube for some time due to his premature status and I was encouraged to breast feed – but finally had to admit defeat. He was a lazy tyke who made an early decision that nose tube feeding and then a rapid flow bottle were preferable to having to do any work!).

That being said, I did express my milk for some time (having been shown on a hand knitted breast in the maternity unit – modern NHS here in Wales, don’t you know!). I have also had friends who have successfully breast-fed and found equal pleasure to that reported by Louise. However, another issue – which again Louise presumably does not have to face – is what to do when the maternity leave is drawing to a close and your little one will not take from a bottle at all. This is the quandary currently facing a friend of mine who doesn’t know what will happen if she can’t resolve this problem over the next few weeks.

Louise finishes her article with a description of her terrible hospitalised labour, which as with many of us, she obviously carries like a badge of honour and wheels out when talking to other mothers for the first time. We can all bore the pants off others with our talk of premature labour, rips, cuts, placental delivery, breastfeeding (ability to or not) dirty maternity units and the frequently poor care we received. But, we were lucky. All my friends and I (along with Louise) managed to come home with infants who are quickly growing into delightful young children. Not everyone is so lucky. She wants to remember that years ago she would not have come home at all with the problems she had during the birth and she was in the right place at the right time (for which she ought to be grateful).

Whether a person chooses to have a child (or children) or not is purely their choice. Yes, it’s become part of the media circus for those choosing not to have off-spring to be wheeled out and asked to defend their decision, which they often do with a certain amount of venom (I was certainly getting pissed off with questions about my not having children and I was in my early 30’s). But, let us remember, it is their choice. Not ours to question or defend. I’ve chosen to have a child, but my colleague, with whom I get on incredibly well, has made the decision not to. I’m not in the right and neither is she. We are on different paths that cross every now and again.

This week has been incredibly complicated from a child-care perspective, but I am already looking forward to Easter and trips out with William. I am afforded a certain luxury in that I am paid well for the work I do and I can make a decision on a trip without too much thought. Does this make up for his being in child-care? I have no idea and will have to wait until he is old enough for me to ask, but am content with the fact that not only does he get the best possible care (and much more finger painting than I would ever do with him), he also gets a sane mother with whom he shares great experiences – other than the first hour of the day!