Wednesday, October 8
and another thing...It's Jack's birthday today. Happy birthday babe - I love you lots and lots. compassionate conservatism
From the Tory Party Conference:
'From the podium, IT consultant Tim Metcalfe yesterday had a clear message:
"Make prison a genuine punishment, bring back solitary confinement, take away their TVs and snooker tables."
(Applause from the audience)
Then: "Bring back birching for young tearaways that terrorise council estates and vandalise graveyards."
(Cheers from the floor)
"Castrate paedophiles."
(More cheers from the floor)
"Bring back hanging."
(Even more cheers from the floor)
And to the climax: "Let us show the country that we really do mean business on crime by showing our support for Tony Martin."
The response: "Hip, hip, hooray".' -- Source
BBC version
Wednesday, October 1
good weekLast week a number of vg things happened. Here are the highlights:
Heard the baby's heart beat for the first time, during a visit to the midwife. She listened to my stomach with a plastic funnel before switching to a mike and amplifier so I could hear what was going on too. And there it was, sloshing away in there at quite a clip, too, but then the midwife told me it beats twice as fast as mine. Very exciting to think of another very small heart thudding away inside my body, and I really wish edI'd taken Jack along, but I thought it was just a routine visit to get my blood pressure checked and my blood test results. Speaking of which, it appears I don't have syphilis. Phew.
Found out that I'm getting some poems published in JAAM 20. Have never had any poems published before, and had almost forgotten I'd sent these ones off so am feeling v pleased with myself. Had a short story published five years in JAAM 8, and that was something I'd written even earlier still, when I was 24. Somehow I don't think I'm going to leave behind a huge literary corpus, unless inspiration strikes very hard, and repeatedly.
Spent the day with Kathie, Mike and wee Robert, now 13 weeks old and much less wrinkly. We went to visit them in Ely, and they took us to a NCT (National Childbirth Trust) second-hand clothes sale where we bought gender neutral clothes for little Anaximander, including a pair of v snazzy penguin booties. However much of the day was spent goggling in dewy-eyed fascination at Robert, who goggled back and occasionally favoured us with a huge, toothless grin. It was all highly instructive: Jack found out that if you lift a small baby over your head and jiggle them, they vomit on you, copiously, and I found out that they pretty much vom on you no matter what you do to them. (During a visit to work earlier Robert managed to vom directly down my cleavage, with hilarious consequences.) Later we went to a huge Sprogs-R-US megastore in Peterborough where we looked at prams and cots and things and I felt faintly panicky at the thing-ness of it all with the rows of bright shiny plastic objects, some of which I didn't even know what they were for, and had to clutch little Robert to my bosom for reassurance, at which point he vommed on me. Again.
