March 30, 2004  

sound of the atom splitting 29 march 2004

There will be an annoying hiatus of posting, and certainly a noticeable gap before any more photos of Rebecca appear. This is due to an unfortunate event affecting our home computer - basically, it went bang. Literally; the power supply blew, taking a fair whack of the motherboard with it. The best estimate we've had for the repair cost has been "considerably more than the replacement value". So until we can sort out a replacement (and yes, I may be swallowing my pride and buying a bloody PC - I can't justify the expense of a mac) there won't be much action I'm afraid. This also means that any email to an @tallpoppy.org email address won't be answered until we get something sorted. Sorry about this - we're working as hard as we can to get this sorted out.

Other milestones in my life: I now have British citizenship. This actually happened about a week and a half ago - I got home from the hospital one night and found the certificate of naturalisation had arrived in the post. Given the other circumstances, we felt that it'd been somewhat superceded by other events. Still, it's a very handy thing to have, and I'm quite happy to have it. The passport application has been duly sent off. The main change will be to make it easier to get back into the UK - instead of this tireless rigamarole about waiting around in customs, I can now saunter through the EU Nationals queue.

And I got citizenship without having to take any kind of test or take part in any kind of ceremony. Thank god. The notion of being force to whistle the theme tune to The Archers, or of standing in Cambridge town hall and swearing allegiance to the Queen ("Which Queen?" "Any old queen!") is simply too horrible for words.

Other advantage: I can now be the sort of boor who uses "As a British citizen, and as a parent, I feel that..." as an argument. Finally, I am part of the solid, thickset mass of The Establishment. I must use this power to subvert itself (eh?).

March 26, 2004  

little loaf of bologna 25 march 2004

This being a brief write up on the birth process of our first child, Rebecca Williams Elder. This took a while to get written up due to the understandable time demands of actually having said first child.

The delivery process can be briefly described as "epic", less briefly described as "forty-six hours of labour followed by a Caesarean", and described in full only with recourse to a number of Anglo-Saxon words inappropriate for polite society.

We'd been pretty much expecting that everything would occur in about the normal order. However, a week and a half after the due date, we were starting to get very antsy. The midwife had said that we should ring the hospital on Sunday morning to discuss the possibility of induction, but that we shouldn't get too worried - they only really started getting gung-ho about induction once the baby was 14 days overdue, and that if they were busy we'd probably be put off a day or two. So come Sunday morning, after a slight delay during which we discovered that the midwife had given us the wrong phone number, we rang the delivery unit. The conversation was quite short: yup, they could fit us in now, as it was quite quiet, so could we be in by 10am? Blimey.

And so the long-anticipated "rush to the hospital" turned out to be a sedate journey across town on a quiet Sunday morning. No screaming, no contractions, just a vague sense of impending dread. Plenty of time to pack our bags. That sort of thing.

Everyone at the Delivery Unit was very nice. In fact, I'd like to go on the record here as saying that despite being very overworked (unfortunately leading to occasional gaps in the care) everyone we dealt with was absolutely stellar. Go NHS, I say.

The next 30-odd hours were spent as follows:

• Heather was given a dose of hormones to encourage contractions.
• We then spent a lot of time walking around, with a focus on walking outide, up/down staircases, etc, in order to get the contractions going.
• The contractions would start, and would be very painful for Heather. Passersby would express concern and offer help.
• Upon getting back to the Delivery Unit, the contractions would promptly stop.
• Upon examination by a midwife, Heather's cervix would be locked up solid.

Slight variant on the above at about four in the morning, when the contractions were coming thick and fast after a second hormone dose. The contractions were causing sufficient discomfort that the midwife on duty drew Heather a warm bath... which promptly caused the contractions to stop. This did not do wonders for our state of mind. Particularly Heather's.

By about 4PM Monday, Heather had managed to have enough contractions (more walking up and down!) to enable her waters to be broken. Basically, this involved the midwife sticking a long pointy instrument (some sort of surgical crochet hook) up Heather's jacksie and popping one of her internal organs. From her reaction, I'd imagine that it was very painful.

This managed to get more contractions going. Unfortunately, these contractions were considerably more painful than the previous ones (which hadn't been a walk in the park with icecream and clowns), but not particularly more effective. A couple of hours later, and not particularly more dilated, the midwife suggested a cunning combination of epidural and a hormone drip. This is kind of the thermonuclear option in induction terms: if this doesn't work, nothing will.

The process of inserting the epidural was quite harrowing. As a bloke in the delivery suite, you always feel like a fifth wheel anyway. Watching a complete stranger insert a very large needle into your wife's spine - it takes feeling useless to a new level. Still, the epidural helped Heather a lot with the pain, and they could hook her up to the hormone drip. This allowed both of us to doze for a while.

7am the next morning arrived. Upon examination, it was determined that Heather had dilated to 9cm (almost, but not quite, enough) and had been there for several hours. The only thing keeping her that dilated was the hormone drip. Given that, and given the mild distress that the baby was experiencing, the doctors strongly recommended an emergency Caesarian section. Under the circumstances, we acquiesced, and the anesthetist got busy beefing up Heather's epidural (from "feeling no labour pains" to "feeling very little indeed from the neck down"). The midwife asked us if we had any names for the baby, as she'd need to know in order to fill out the paperwork. Since we didn't know the sex, we were a bit cagy and said that we'd have to see. Thus, the first batch of paperwork referred to "Baby Elder". I was lead away to change into theatre blues.

Having got changed, I made some small talk with the medical technician while waiting for Heather to be wheeled through. He advised me that C-sections normally take about an hour, but since Heather was already epiduraled it'd be quicker. So I go into the theatre with a rough plan: 30 mins making careful cuts, get the baby out, 30 mins carefully stitching. Ha! The surgeons turned up, an aide set Heather up with that little curtain so you can't see a complete stranger fondling your own intestines while you watch, and away they went. I'll happily admit that this was psychologically one of the hardest parts of the whole process for me, and I was having a bastard time trying not to burst out into tears. As I was supposedly acting as the emotional support for Heather, who was actually undergoing an extensive medical procedure, this was bit odd - she was in better psychological shape than I was. Four minutes in, I was staring into Heather's eyes, muttering some platitude and trying not to cry, and we both heard the full-throated annoyed scream of a newborn infant. Turns out that the procedure for a Caesarian is five minutes quick but careful cutting, then fifty minutes careful stitching to close the wound back up. Who knew?

We'd had a birthplan. I won't go into it in detail - basically, take what you think you'd want your standard left-wing educated middle-class couple to want, and you'd not be far off - and it'd all fallen by the wayside. Out of twenty stipulations, we fulfilled precisely four:

• No medical students - as it happens, there weren't any around, so this couldn't have happened anyway.
• No pethidine - this decision was pretty early in the induction, so it was followed. We didn't like the idea of an anesthetic that crossed the placenta and made the baby groggy, hence no pethidine (morphiates being a bad thing for this).
• Jack to discover the sex and tell Heather.
• Vitamin K to be administered via injection.

Everything else - our lovely planned hippie waterbirth - went tits up. These, as Curtis Blow once observed, are the breaks.

We'd also spent a lot of time carefully taping the music to give birth to. Under the circumstances, that went out the window, and we ended up with what happened to be playing on the stereo. Thus our original plan, to have the baby to the melodic sounds of The Darkness, were dashed, in favour of the surgical team's selection of Dido. Close.

So I heard the scream of my firstborn child. I turned, going "what the fuck was that?", as I was not expecting this sound for another twenty minutes. And as I turned, I was presented with my daughter's body, as the midwife was holding her there, fresh from Heather's belly, ready for me to tell Heather what sex she was. This was a bit overwhelming. Plus, I was very aware that it's surprisingly easy to get this wrong (that whole penis/umbilical cord distinction), so I took a couple of shell-shocked breaths while the midwife gave off "as you faff around, she loses body heat" vibes and then I turned to Heather and said "She's a girl!" and burst into tears. Heather burst into tears too, so I looked sensitive rather than a woofter, and we were groovy.

The midwife took Rebecca off and performed an apgar test, and then beckoned me over. I walked over, and she handed Rebecca to me. Talk about a head trip, is all I can say. I stagger back to the table, where the long and arduous process of stitching Heather up was underway, and sat back down by Heather's head. We spent the rest of the time in theatre with me sitting there by Heather, with this small and annoyed person tightly swaddled and clutched in my arms, completely gobsmacked by the whole thing. I had the occasional Lot's wife moment when I kept thinking "surely they must have about finished the stitching" and glanced down the table. Since I could see past the little curtain (it's just there to stop the patient themselves seeing owt), I kept getting the odd disturbing glimpse of internal organs. Bit worrying, but given what I was holding in my hands, we could deal.

The rest of the day was spent shuffling around between Heather in the recovery room, Rebecca in the NICU (she had a bit of a temperature), and sitting outside the hospital phoning the relatives. Thank goodness for global telecommunications: within an hour of the birth, I was calling the grandparents.

I hit an odd psychological effect during the day. Once you get onto the delivery unit (and therafter) everyone calls you "Dad" - as in, "and could Dad please follow me around here", "Dad, move your feet", etc. They don't know your name, and it's a simple descriptive title. Accurate, or will be in a bit. It's a complete headtrip until you get used to it. Dad is a big bastard with a red beard who we see at family get-togethers. Why are they talking about him? Whoops, they're looking at me. Just a slight mental disconnect, fairly easily resolved, but still a bugger. Particularly when you've popped around the ward to ask a significant quesiton about your wife's iron supplementation and you have have a 60-year-old grey-haired NHS veteran nurse calmly look at you and say "So Dad, what can I help you with?" - it's very odd.

Of course, this is just my take on the events - Heather has her own take on events. And she's funnier than I am, curse it.

March 17, 2004  

from her mother's womb untimely 16 march 2004

Yup.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Rebecca Williams Elder, born via C-section at 8:03am this morning, weighing in at a respectable 3.85kg (8 pounds 8 ounces). I'm too knackered to type more, as I haven't had any decent sleep for 72 hours. A full write up to follow at some point.

March 13, 2004  

judas wiggle 12 march 2004

Nope.

Pet hates of mine: "it's not running a red light if other people do it too". You're waiting at a traffic light, a stream of traffic coming from your right and turning into the road ahead of you. Their lights go amber - no-one's slowing down. Then red. And the drivers don't stop. The light's been red for about five seconds, your light has just flashed amber and is about to go green, and they're still going through the junction in a nice steady stream of traffic. I think that the theory is that as long as there isn't a noticeable gap between the cars, then it's not really running a red light (not dissimilar to how stage finishes work in the Tour, where any riders finishing within about a bike's length of each other all get the same time). I see this happen every day. It's terribly, terribly annoying.

Fran: I'm going to be her birth partner.
Bernard: Won't there be lots of, you know, screaming and blood?
Fran: Oh no, I'll just get drunk. And she'll be on drugs. Actually, she'll be on drugs and I'll be drunk... it'll be just like the old days.

Black Books

If the baby is born today, it'll have the birthday 12/3/4. Surely that's sufficient inducement?

...the old class system isn't flexible enough to be of use to supermarkets when deciding such matters as where to put their stores, what kind of music to have on the PA, or whether to move the beer next to the nappies after 6pm (as some stores do) so after-work booze-hound fathers will remember there's something in their lives other than themselves.

The Guardian [source]

Interesting article and well worth reading. Speaking as a member of the young, urban, affluent crowd, we tend to shop at either Tescos or Sainsburys, with a marked preference for Tesco. This could well be geographic, though, as Tesco is more conveniently located for us - when doing online grocery shops, we tend to go for Sainsburys. I occasionally pop into Aldi because they have very good, cheap German food (the bratwurst is particularly notable), but always feel uncomfortable. I must be more middle-class than I'd thought.

Odd incident at work the other day. During a meeting, we get told that we're now being managed by someone in the US. I mention that I'd met them a few years ago (demo'd the system I was working on at the time to them). I then add, "but don't worry, I was very obsequious." There is a short pause. The odd blank look. Then one of my coworkers turns to the others and says "I think that it means that he swore a lot."

Thus shall I be remembered.

March 10, 2004  

braced for impact 9 march 2004

The score is still nil-nil.

Spent a bit of time on Sunday arvo cleaning up and repotting my CPs outside the back of the house. I had to pull a lot of dead pitchers from the Sarracenia, repot a couple that were looking a bit iffy, that sort of thing. As I was repotting a rather nice Sarracenia purpurea ssp venosa, some of the potting mix started squirming. A frog had dug down the peat at the side of the pot, burying himself for winter. He was about 3cm in length and moving quite sluggishly. I put him into the middle of the biggest pot and hoped that he survived. I really like having the kind of garden that has frogs hiding in places (they really get on well with the carnivores).

We've been trying to make sure that Heather gets out of the house for a walk once or twice a day. So Saturday afternoon we decide to walk to the Daily Bread (aka the Hippy-Hippy Co-op) and pick up some grub. We decide to go the long way around. If we go the short way, the trip will take four minutes and won't be much use to man nor beast. The long way allows us to extend the trip to about twenty minutes, which is a bit more like it. A quiet walk around the block, pick up some pesto, home in time for a swift cuppa. Result.

This was not what happened.

What happened was that at about the halfway point, it started to rain slightly. Ho ho, we said, we're tough and will not melt. Heather put up her umbrella. I cocked the brim of my hat. Fah! Two minutes later, it was sleeting and hailing, we were both soaked to the skin, and we were both bloody miserable. Question for the class: what happens when you put a heavily pregnant woman under moderate physiological stress, such as incipient hypothermia? That's right, Ffitch-Forbes, they get contractions! That's a point for Birkbeck House. So we're ten minutes walk from home - a travel time which is constantly increasing, as (funnily enough) it's actually really hard to walk when having constant contractions, so Heather couldn't move particularly fast. Heather was particularly unimpressed with the whole situation. The contractions were coming thick and fast, she was freezing, wet, and in intense pain, and she regarded the whole thing as my fault (my idea to have the walk). Despite our worries about having the baby in the carpark of the local estate pub, we managed to get home through a cunning mixture of limping, swearing, and louder swearing. It's these little moments that truly make me feel that I'm being supportive. Although it might have been a bit more supportive not to get her into that situation in the first place.

And you've probably guessed, but as soon as we got Heather home and into a hot bath, the contractions stopped. Ah well. Fingers crossed for tomorrow!

Today's theme: Got Myself a Good Man by Pucho and his Latin Soul Orchestra. A lovely little piece of funk, recently sampled quite a bit (notably used by Sainsburys a year or two back on some ads with that Jamie Oliver, to imply a young, funky sensibility). For all that, it's sampled 'cos it's great, so get on yer P2P client and get gert big handfulls of it.

Followed closely by Chicks on Speed's Wordy Rappinghood; solid funk beat, bit of vocoder, nice dance vocals, with the touches we've come to expect from CoS. Stylee.

March 05, 2004  

inch of ice 3 march 2004

No, it hasn't yet.

One of the things that makes me very happy is having good socks. I walk a lot, and this sort of thing is quite important to me. And the best pair of socks I've ever owned just disintegrated on me last night, damn it. They were a pair of X-Socks mountainbike socks that I'd bought myself as a treat before tackling the 2002 London to Cambridge bike ride. I was not unnaturally very sceptical about cycle-specific socks, particularly ones with packaging that boasts of being supremely engineered, made from a variety of highly scientific fabrics, being specific to the left and right foot, etc. But hey, I wanted a bit of a psychological boost before the ride, and they were only quite expensive (rather than obscenely so). So I bought them, and I wore them, and goddamn if they weren't the best socks I've ever worn. Ludicrously comfortable, not too heavy, and kept me feet in good nick - can't fault them. I ended up wearing them around a lot, which probably lead to their downfall: I don't think they were designed to go inside walking boots (heels were reinforced, but not too heavily). The inevitable happened, a few holes appeared in the heel, and I caught my heel while pulling 'em on and ripped one of them in half. Ah well. Mind you, having discovered that X-Socks also do tramping socks, I'm now trying to find a stockist in Cambridge so I can get meself another pair or two - truly highly recommended.

OK, so I'm passionate about socks. Sue me. Good/bad socks make a real difference to my quality of life, OK?

It's kind of odd being the sort of person who raves about socks on their website.

The cold weather continues apace. My water bucket by the shed (it used to be a bin, now it's a water bucket - that's recycling for you) usually has about an inch of ice on top in the morning. Some of that melts during the day.

Both President Bush and Sen. Kerry have talked about marriage as a sacred institution, but the government is not charged with defending the sacred. That is the job of religious leaders. When the sacred needs politicians to defend it, the sacred is in big trouble. The surest way to protect the sacredness of something is to keep politicians as far away from it as possible.

Richard J. Rosendall

[source]

March 02, 2004  

buzzing wrists 1 march 2004

Round-up of my initial reactions to British politics:

• Report urges the government to encourage public health: "Oi! Brown! Knock VAT off cycling kit!"
• Annette Winterton's racist joke: "Hey, that was in last week's Popbitch! What's a tory MP doing reading that?"

Can I help my reactions?

Actually, the suggestion to knock VAT off cycling kit is entirely serious. Cycle helmets have been VAT-exempt for a year or two, to encourage people to wear them (and at an effective 20% discount, it's working!). Why not make all cycling kit VAT-free? Heck, why not make all sporting goods VAT-exempt? Of course, you'd have to have an exemption for replica football strips (except that the retailers would just up the prices anyway), otherwise large sections of the population would suddenly find their entire clothing budgets were tax-exempt. But seriously, it's a well-established principle of British legislation that you can knock VAT off things to encourage the population to do stuff - and frankly I quite fancy a 17.5% discount on me next bike-related purchase.

We ended up going for a wander around Milton Country Park on Sunday afternoon. It had snowed earlier in the day, and the ground still had a the remnants of a hard frost on. We saw two kingfishers: brilliant cyan swoops in midair, or sitting on a branch staring beadily down at the water surface. Beautiful.

All through university, I had a bit of a comic habit. I justified spending a moderate amount of my income on comics by recourse to two fundamental principles:

1. Although I was collecting comic books, I wasn't one of those geeks who collects comic books - I was a perfectly normal, well-socialised human being, capable of maintaining a good social life (which included contact with the opposite sex, and even gettin' me freak on), who just happened to collect comics.
2. These comics were not frivolous purchases; they would one day be worth cold, hard cash to obsessive collectors.

Point 1 is, I think, uncontestable, but point 2 was always a bit of a quiet fiction. I liked to think that I was building an odd form of equity (much like those idiots speculating on the rare wine market a.k.a filling the basement with overpriced grape juice), but I really knew that it was a bit of a con. I was buying comics because I liked reading comics, and that was all there was to it. However, to keep the fiction alive, I went through the basic trappings of comic collecting - storing the buggers in little bags, keeping them carefully hermetically sealed. And hey, a complete run of Garth Ennis' classic Preacher has to be worth a bob or two, right?

But I didn't really think that I'd ever get around to selling any of my comics, or that they'd really be worth much when they did. And I wasn't willing to flog off anything that I liked too much: much as Preacher is probably worth a few quid, I'd need to get a good enough price for the comics to justify buying the graphic novels to replace them. And there's just no way that The Invisibles or The Filth are leaving this house, let's get that right clear.

So after my recent foray into selling stuff on eBay, I decided to give it a try and to try and sell of some of the weaker stuff in my comic collection. Hey, with a bit of luck I'd boost my seller rating, possibly make enough back to cover the cost of a second hand bottle sterilizer or something. I listed some of the less good comics in my collection, and have been astonished to see them attract some quite good bids in the first day of the auction. What? Have I actually been sitting on a goldmine for the last few years? Or does the general comic-collecting public just have no taste?

Actually, it's probably just that I'm a bit amazed that anyone's bidding on these comics, as I'd considered them to be absolutely dire (hence why I'm flogging 'em). Still, dire and cheap is a powerful combination to some people.

You may, like me, have been idly wondering what the powerful creative minds behind The Muppet Show are doing these days. Wonder no more! I noted with interest that the immortal Chris Langham, who was one of the key writers on the Muppets, is now writing and occasionally cameo-ing in Channel 4's contemporary political satire show, Bremner, Bird and Fortune. Long-time fans of the Muppets may remember the epsiode where he appeared as a guest star - a last-minute replacement for Richard Prior, who had set himself on fire while freebasing crack in the US and wasn't really up to it. Bremner, Bird and Fortune is very much worth watching: wonderfully subtle political stuff, often eschewing cheap character-based humour (i.e. taking cheap shots at politicians' foibles) in favour of serious (funny!) analysis of general trends in politics. Well-informed political humour is usually worthwhile, and this is no exception.

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