Vein/ Vanity

My neuroses seem currently to have settled on my ankles. I'm getting all sorts of aches and pains in my legs (OK, so I'm getting all sorts of aches and pains in most of the rest of me, too, but the ones in my legs are new) - and I glimpsed what looked like blue vein lines round my right ankle a couple of days ago. So I'm currently studiously avoiding looking at my own legs, for fear of what I might find.

This isn't actually that difficult - although shaving my legs tomorrow will be a bit more of a challenge - as I almost always wear trousers, and always seem to go to bed and get up at the moment at times when the heating isn't on so that I scramble between trousers and pyjama trousers in as little time as physically possible. But the memory of my mother and grandmothers' varicose veins is haunting me: they were always hideous and repulsive. I'd also always kind of assumed that they were to do with them being old and fat. Google tells me that pregnancy hormones have something to do with it as well (my Mum and both of my grandmothers developed them during pregnancy), but the preconception - and the sense of childhood nightmare - remains.

I'm sitting here with my legs crossed, as otherwise my laptop is at the wrong angle to type. I suspect that's only making things worse, but by not looking I can at least avoid confirmation of the problem - at least, I can until we go to Gran Canaria next Wednesday, at which point I might want to wear a skirt.

(I liked the idea of ending this with a picture of Nora Batty's legs, but Google images insisted on producing pictures of Madonna and/or amputees instead, which isn't going to help the neuroses one little bit...)

And then there was (eventually) light...

I'd like to attribute this to more silly rule making by the noddy nanny state, but I know it's actually an EU thing. Even though I know that they will always come up with something new for me to rant about, it irks me not to be able to blame the government for this kind of thing - even though I'm sure one of the Millibands (and several legions of civil servants) were complicit in it.

But still, who the fuck decided that it should become more or less impossible to buy a lightbulb (and even more importantly, work out which kind of lightbulb can be used with which shades and lampbases) without a post-graduate degree in electronics??? We don't buy lamps or lightbulbs very often, and had enough in the cupboard to keep ignoring the fact that the lightbulb section of the supermarket was getting odder and odder. But this week we've had to get our heads out of the sand simply because moving stuff around, and a broken lamp, meant we had to go and buy several new 'bits' of lighting.

In fact, all attempts to find a simple lamp base and lamp shade failed, so one of our lighting problems - relating to the corner of the sitting room - remained unresolved. The others were just far, far more difficult than either of us imagined it was possible for them to be. The new lights for the husband's study have bulbs which are only about twice the size of Christmas tree lights, which meant that to start with he threw one of them out with the packaging. These are not bulbs I have ever seen in shops, and I have no idea how to go about finding a replacement. And when we asked an assistant in Peter Jones whether we had to go by the 'actual' wattage, or the 'this is what it looks like' wattage in buying bulbs for another new floor lamp, we got a five minute explanation of why it wasn't as simple as that - and were left with absolutely no idea what the answer was. Eventually the husband found a different assistant, presented him with the lamp and the bulbs we planned to put in it, and asked whether it would be OK. He said it would, although I'm not sure either of us was sure that he understood the question.

I can only assume that the end result of this - in addition to the toxins which the new-style bulbs contain - will be large numbers of light fittings being dumped into landfill. Very eco-friendly. And people installing a large number of small lights to get around the fact that they can no longer buy lightbulbs which actually light a room sufficiently to be able to live and work in it.

And does anyone know why John Lewis have started boxing lamps in such a way that they take ages to assemble - and it's almost impossible to get them back in the packaging (which you have to do to get a full refund if you return them) if you decide that they don't look right when you get them home?? I know that's not the EU's fault, but it did make the whole experience quite a lot worse than it needed to be, and has left us with a lamp which is about a foot shorter than it needs to be if it's not going to look as if it's been squashed.



(Not that lightbulbs actually look like that any more.)

Body and Soul

I think I'm finally beginning to feel a bit better. There have been a couple of days recently when I could even forget I was pregnant for something like ten to fifteen minutes (I know that's not the best measure of health, especially as I'm definitely starting to expand, but it's still the only one that makes sense to me). I've started to very gradually try to widen my diet: a tiny bit of red meat, some melon (which thankfully hasn't made me throw up like the apple about 4 weeks ago did - yet). I still can't cope with the thought of garlic, tomatoes or rice, all of which are annoying and limiting - but it did feel like a bit of a new beginning.

But then the fact that I had a bit more energy, and less of my brain was being occupied with pain, nausea and general hormonal fog, meant that I actually started feeling more down (in the 'metaphorical large black cloud hanging over head' sort of way). The fact that I have nothing to do, and have actually lost touch with quite a few people over the past few months, became a lot more apparent. And I also realised that a lot of the people I was 'hanging out' with on forums - as a low-stress substitute for actual human interaction - were actually really quite unpleasant, and in some cases doing things which were borderline criminal. I even lurked on Mumsnet, in search of a new online home, but there's no way I can cope with quite so much domestic ... 'stuff' - so I'm now officially homeless in the virtual world as well as being pretty stuck in the real one.

One of my friends - who is still employed, and has a two year old - described pregnancy even in a work environment as very isolating, as nobody really has an expectations of what you should or should not be doing. The way I had always seen it - from the other side of the fence - was that other people had to assume that you could perform as normal (even when it was patently obvious that you couldn't) - and then had to pick up the pieces without complaint when you didn't. Either way, it does seem that, whatever the context, pregnancy sucks - I'd just like the opportunity to try the alternative right now, as it might at least distract me!

Anyway, just when I was trying to cheer myself up by starting to try to plan a holiday and think about trying to get back to studying, I threw up again. Thankfully it wasn't the usual start of a 24-hour stomach-acid storm - I was able to eat 'normally' again after a few hours - but it completely destroyed the tiny bit of confidence that I'd managed to scrape together. I'm getting anxious about the Downs risk again now; but I'm also anxious about the birth, about what will happen after the birth, whether I'm going to get varicose veins, how heavy I'm going to get, whether I'll ever get a job again, whether the husband is going to lose his job, whether the balcony drain is blocked and whether the boiler is going to blow up. If I manage to stop thinking about one of them something else looms large in its place, and I can't see that removing one of the factors completely would actually change the overall effect.

Which brings me, finally, to something else I failed to blog about on a timely basis. The Stephen Fry Twitterstorm (I really, really want it to be a fritterstorm, but I have no way of disseminating or enforcing this...): he's bipolar, and posted something which made it clear to anyone who has even the vaguest notion of what that means that he was thinking of quitting Twitter at a time when he was experiencing a 'down'. It's well-documented that his downs can be quite severe, but don't tend to last very long. So the entirety of the British media machine - including the BBC news website, the main Channel 4 news bulletin, and most of the broadsheets - decide to report the story as news. However, the story wasn't 'Stephen Fry has mood swing': it was 'Stephen Fry quits Twitter because it's too nasty'. Fry was apparently on a plane for most of the fuss, and felt a lot better about life when he landed to sunshine in LA - but that doesn't pardon the fact that the media response was utterly unhinged, and completely failed to take his psychiatric history into account (even though the same media outlets had also reported that in some detail, a year or two back). Grrrr.

I can't help envying him the sunshine, though.





(Nothing at all like life in this particular corner of W14 - especially as that picture seems to insist on being quite a bit bigger than I want it to be.)

More from the domestic front

I haven't really interracted enough with the Outside World for it to annoy me today (although I still hope that an endorsement from Brown is the kiss of death to Blair's presidential ambitions: I hate them both equally, albeit in different ways). About the only thing which has impinged is the darkness: why the hell the clocks have to move at all, and plunge me into this annual trough of doom and despair beats me. I just looked at the time, expecting it to be nearly bedtime, to find that it is not even half past nine. I know that people mutter about paper boys dying in Scotland, but the reality is that paper boys have been largely superseded - by a jumble of too much homework, over-protective parents, and people just not reading as many newspapers as they used to. So I have the added irritant of knowing that, as is usually the case, my suffering is actually completely unnecessary.

The little things do, as ever, seem to be ganging up on me, though. A lamp in our dining room has gone ping - and it must have been more than just the bulb that pinged because replacing the bulb hasn't fixed it. And my sewing machine - which was only serviced a fortnight ago - has started hiccoughing again, which means that my plans to fill up the next few days with sorting out a quilt for my niece (which might at least have made them drag less heavily, amidst the general doom and gloom) have gone out the window. And both of our bedroom windows were stuck for most of the day - one of them closed, one of them wide open - and although I did eventually manage to close the open one, I still need to open the closed one to try to clean the outside of it.

And then there's the husband. He's currently getting drunk after a masonic meeting: the therefore left the wardrobe door wide open with a paint-spattered step ladder in front of it when he went to work this morning, as he had to hunt around for the relevant tie (again) in the thirty seconds before he left. If he'd actually sorted all of his stuff out on Sunday, into our newly decorated spare room, as he had said he would, the tie would have been in a different wardrobe, at a lower level, and even if he had left the stepladder up it would have been in a room which I would have had little cause to go into. But he's not stuck in the flat all day, every day - so the furniture in the wrong places, the heaps of stuff, and even random stepladders, don't really impinge on his consciousness. Grrrr.

I'm now going to go to bed, because I can't think of anything else to do.



(About the only good bit of the day - although I had a carrot one, and this looks like one of the scary alien-blood pink ones instead.)

The Nanny State Part 2. Credit Cards.

OK, I'm going to keep this short because I'm still feeling crap, but I gather our dear government is now proposing to protect idiots who are surprised at having to repay debt (at interest) they incur on credit cards from their own stupidity.

I also gather that the idiots are up in arms, because the proposals include a requirement that the minimum payment on cards be increased.

And the economists can't work out whether it is trying to make credit more or less available.

And the government claim that one of the outrageous things about the current system of credit cards is the fact that the rules are so complicated that they are impossible to understand: as someone else said at some point today (I can't actually remember who), have they looked at their own child tax credit rules recently??

I just wish the lot of them would be eaten up by a large - but transient and selective - intergalactic slime monster. And that the rest of the country would be suddenly struck with a large dose of cynicism and common sense, which would ensure that they would be replaced with something less hideous.



(Not sure if this is the government or the slime monster, but still.)

Pills and Potions

I've been feeling crap today. Nauseous, headache, no energy - all for no apparent reason. I've taken some anti-emetics (which don't actually stop me throwing up if my body's determined, but do take the edge off the feeling of nausea); not taken any paracetamol because the thought of throwing it up is just too horrible - and there's not much else I can do.

Admittedly, life in general did get better when I realised that Gavsicon was a) nowhere near as revolting , and b) much more effective than the generic stuff which the hospital gave me. That tasted of aniseed - which is likely to make me retch even at the best of times, making it unsurprising that I was repeatedly throwing up lumps of inert pinkish looking gloop, which looked like it might have originated in a BBC special effects workshop in about 1978. Gaviscon does at least seem to deal with my intermittent 'stomach acid is making my throat burn' problem - but that doesn't seem to be it today, so there is no point in taking any. And it does still taste like particularly ferocious toothpaste (note to the makers of Gaviscon: why can't it taste like dolly mixtures?).

I can't help thinking that if men got pregnant, and felt this crap, this often, for this long, then there would have been a far bigger research effort to find ways of alleviating some of the symptoms. Clearly, after Thalidomide and the general Rise of The Lawyer, research was likely to be avoided as too risky - I'm therefore suffering because nobody thought it worth trying to fix before about 1960.

This doesn't make me feel any happier about it - especially after numerous interactions with members of the medical profession, many of whom actually seem to lose all interest in trying to make sure that I'm feeling OK the moment they discover that I'm pregnant. That seems to be meant to make me happy about feeling like death; which, oddly enough, I'm not.

To make matters worse, the BBC have just stuck something on their website which says that the Chelsea & Westminster has the highest caesarian rates in the country (they have agreed to redo the scan next week... but I'm still not feeling particularly confident about them). That might vaguely bother me, but what is really bothering me is that my mother will almost certainly feel the need to either email or call to make sure that I haven't missed it. Gah.

(Not Gaviscon. And still not my mother.)

Freedom of speech?

I'm beginning to think that pregnancy and blogging don't work very well: you have only a limited amount of energy, and by the time you have finished 'the essentials' you're fit for nothing except lying on the sofa wishing you could reach the TV remote and the biscuit tin but not having the strength to do either.

So this is a bit of a delayed reaction. The thing that first really wound me up was the reaction to Jan Moir's Daily Mail piece on Stephen Gately. Yes, it was a nasty, insinuating piece of tabloid journalism. Tabloid journalism is often nasty and insinuating. But a very small group of people got hold of it, got offended by it, and decided to make a fuss. That's their right, and by right the rest of us can also ignore them, but - as with the Jonathan Ross/ Russell Brand hoohah - they decided to enlist other people to make the fuss harder to ignore. There were Twitter messages telling people to complain to the Press Complaints Commission, giving a link to the PCC website and details of which articles of the press code they believed had been contravened - all within 140 characters. I don't know how many of the people who complained did so without having read the article: I strongly suspect that most of them only read the article in order to be offended by it and then have something to complain about.

The internet, of course, makes this possible. It's not an inherently bad thing. But our opinion-poll sensitive, New-Labour-influenced institutions seem unable to distinguish between things which are 'bad' and things which a lot of people, most of whom have been lead directly to the conclusion by a media outlet or lobby-type group with a strong vested interest, have complained about as being 'bad'. The end result is that, in the interest of what tends to be put forward as something vague like 'human decency', or the kind of liberal values which 'everyone should share', a lot of things are in danger of becoming unsayable.

It doesn't, of course, stop them being said. On the same day as the Jan Moir article, Digital Spy posted an article which stated explicitly that Gately and his husband had 3-way sex with a stranger shortly before Gately died (based on an interview with the 'stranger') which would doubtless have shocked the Daily Mail's core readership - but it was safely buried in the internet fringes. One of the things the internet does, in making it possible for anyone to express an opinion, is to actually put more emphasis on 'legitimate' and 'reliable' media sources - while at the same time providing a channel for pressuring those sources into limiting what they publish.

However, before I'd managed to say anything about this, the BNP/ Question Time fiasco brought the whole question of what making certain things 'unsayable' does much more into the open. I hate Question Time: I hate political debate in general. I have no idea what anyone is ever meant to gain from it other than a fairly fundamental distaste for the people who engage in it - and although I have only seen short extracts of the programme, it looks like it was possibly even more unpleasant than usual. For once, though, it might have proved a useful - if difficult, and inconvenient (especially to the liberals whose very foundation is a conviction that the rest of the world would think like them if it only had the chance) - point. A whole heap of things have become 'unmentionable' in the past decade, and people are getting increasingly pissed off about it.

Next time I'll try and say something about it before it becomes last week's news...

My life, their hands

This isn't even vaguely funny, and isn't going to have a picture at the end.

I went to the Chelsea & Westminster hospital today, for a scan. They normally scan pregnant women at 20 weeks for abnormalities: I had come out with an increased risk of Down's syndrome, from one of the earlier tests, but wasn't comfortable with the idea of amniocentesis. So they had suggested scheduling the test a week or two earlier, and having it with one of the consultants. That at least gave me a bit of reassurance.

Except they didn't do what they said they would do. They scheduled the scan earlier than normal - which presumably means that they will have seen less than they would have done if they had done it at the normal time - but I showed up to find that it was being done by a very fresh-faced, clearly relatively junior sonographer. He couldn't see anything wrong, expressed surprise at the scan being done early, but said he reckoned he'd seen enough that it didn't need to be redone.

I have absolutely no idea what comfort I'm meant to take from this, and absolutely no confidence in the result.

This comes after a midwife's appointment a couple of weeks back when the midwife - who was an impatient non-native English speaker - repeatedly interrupted my questions before I had finished them, said things which contradicted my GP, and then contradicted herself when I queried what she had said (usually because I managed to finish giving her the information that I was trying to give her in the first place, although she did accuse me of lying at least once when she had simply failed to listen to the nuance of what I had said...). The point at which I decided she was dangerous was when she told me that an injection, which the leaflet she had just given me made clear was a human blood product, 'had no risk at all' - as she stared at me indignantly for daring to ask the question.

My life is in these people's hands. I don't seem to have much choice in the matter, and they are absolutely terrifying me.

From the domestic front...

There are just too many things winding me up today. I actually can't decide which one to rant about: the Jan Moir/ Press Complaints Commission Twitter storm makes my blood pressure rise just thinking about it (not a bad thing, at one level, as it makes me less likely to pass out - but it also makes me want to start bombing Wandsworth, and invading random bits of central Europe); the BA chief suggesting that people only travel because they 'need' to is clearly delusional (did I mention I live under the Heathrow flight path? Over the summer, when I was feeling really ill, the noise levels were reducing me to tears several times a week); and the X-factor infestation (Cheryl Cole and the one who isn't Leona are apparently set for joint chart domination) makes me wish that I could just unplug the country and leave it to rot...

So I'll rant about the little things instead.

Like the fact that my laptop and our wireless thingummy decided to stop talking to one another this afternoon, just at the point when I was too tired to walk to the kitchen to see if it could be fixed.

And I finally got a cheque from HM Revenue & Customs (who had closed my tax records for last year without even sending me a tax return, even though it was inevitable that they owed me money) - made out to my married name, when all of my bank accounts are still in my maiden name.

And I made it to Senate House library today for the first time in months - only to find that they have moved all of the English books to an area which for all of the natural light it has could well be in a nuclear bunker (it's on the 6th floor of a building in Bloomsbury). And they had lost the book that I gone there to pick up.

And I unleashed some kind of hideous chemical cloud over W14 by turning on our heating this evening; not realising that my Dad had not turned off the radiator in our spare room before painting it.

And my husband is incapable of planning even 24 hours ahead. This morning he had to take clothes into work for a function this evening (something which he had known about for months) - and with about 3 minutes to go before he needed to be out the door he was clambering around with a step ladder hunting for a particular club tie, and then turning about a dozen shoes out of a holdall trying to find a pair of black lace ups which didn't have holes in the bottom ...



(Not the Senate House library, although you can only tell because the library currently has signs everywhere telling you that's where you are. It could, however, be where my husband's shoes have gone...)

The Nanny State Part 1. Mortgage Regulation.

I'm numbering these as I'm sure they are going to mount up, rapidly, as Gordon Brown tries to dig himself out of the electoral humiliation he richly deserves.

This is the man who, in his time as Chancellor, tripled the volume of tax legislation in the UK. So he's a man who likes rules. Micro-manager, budget-inefficient rules. And quite a lot of the tax legislation which he rammed down the throats (just listen to the speed with which he delivers the statistics in his old budget speeches: he does it, quite deliberately, so that it is impossible to actually hear and comprehend what he's saying) of an incomprehending parliament was correcting - or even repealing - other tax legislation which he himself had introduced. So he likes rules, but is absolutely crap at working out which ones will be effective. Unsurprisingly, the UK tax system became notorious in the international business community for being more unstable than that of your average coup-prone, third-world disaster zone - and a number of companies left the UK as a result.

However, while he was imposing thousands of pages of rules on bewildered taxpayers, he clearly didn't bother with what should have been the other side of his remit - financial services regulation. So now we have some catching up to do. Consistent with his record on the tax system - which displayed a huge panache for ineffective, inconvenient changes which completely missed the point which they thought that they were trying to address - rather than trying to stop banks take risks, he's now going to try to stop them stopping silly idiots who want to borrow more than they can afford from taking risks.

This will, of course, do nothing at all to stabilise the global financial markets. All it will do is give people who don't follow rules yet another basis on which to demand that banks pay them money as compensation for misselling - to the detriment of the people who actually repaid their loans, and otherwise generally followed the rules, in the first place. And those same, sensible citizens - who currently have to put up with several cold calls a day inviting them to make claims for missold loans, even if they have been stupid enough to pay off all their loans in accordance with the contractual terms and without suing anyone at all - will also have to tolerate calls asking them if they want to sue for having been sold a mortgage they couldn't afford.

It would still piss me off if this was just going to have the effect of protecting people against their own stupidity: I fully believe in making idiots pay for being idiots. But when you introduce silly, detailed rules, it's actually usually the clever-but-unpleasant people who benefit. I know of a one-time FTSE 100 FD who claimed he had been missold a mortgage product (under current legislation) - despite being an ACA, and having spent the best part of a decade working for one of the large accounting firms - and got a five-figure sum in compensation. He spent it on a built-in home cinema and entertainment system. The proposed changes - as well as preventing self-employed people from getting mortgages and making completely bizarre demands on financial institutions - will only result in the same kind of thing happening again, in 4 or 5 years time, but based on a different set of rules. And Gordon will still claim he couldn't have foreseen it...


(Not Gordon Brown - thinner, brighter, and generally much less severe - but showing a similar degree of grounding in reality...)

Where to begin?

I'm pissed off at the moment. Not just about one or two things. I'm pissed off about just about everything.

I'm nearly 40. I was made redundant last December, and I'm pregnant. I realise that this last bit is generally meant to be cause for celebration, but I have absolutely no idea why. So far (which is a couple of days short of 18 weeks: even though the first 4 weeks are a bizarre medical fiction, it's still a bloody long time) it's a truly hideous experience, and very much what I would have expected with terminal cancer. I've been feeling as if I'm dying since the middle of July, and then people expect me to be happy about it. I pass out, I throw up, I can't plan anything, can never do anything social which involves food and drink, wake up in the middle of the night, and have mysterious pains in my neck from spending too long propped up at weird angles on sofas and beds.

I had been working on a masters, which I've had to defer - and been thinking about a doctorate, which now seems like a pipe dream. I have no future, which does at least bear a degree of symmetry to my current situation as I don't seem to have a present either. And then I see the crap that's going on in the rest of the world - and realise that nobody has any reason to be interested in what I say about it, and that if I try to do anything about it I'll just throw up more. If I could, I would run away. Literally. But that wouldn't solve anything, and I'd pass out before I got to the end of the road.

So here I am, angry as hell, and generally rather stuck. I thought about referring to myself as a grumpy cow, rather than an angry hag - but it seemed all too cuddly and harmless. We always called my mother a stupid old cow, and claimed it was a term of endearment.



(Not my mother, in case anyone was wondering).