Olulabelle

Colour Theory for babies

I'm reading lots of papers about the theory of colour and the use of colour to stimulate psychologically helpful frames of mind because I'm about to paint the babies room.

A colour called Baker-Miller pink is used to paint holding cells and prisons because it allegedly surpresses violent and aggressive behaviour. Young children in New Zealand showed greater physical strngth and made more positive mood paintings after spending time in pink rooms compared to blue or grey ones. A high school in America found it's children had lower blood pressure in the afternoon if they had been studying in a yellow room.

It's all fascinating, but I am still no nearer to deciding what colour the baby would like. Interestingly babies respond best to black and white geometric patterns in their first few months, because their focusing muscles in their eyes don't work brilliantly so everything is a bit fussy.

I'd paint a big geometric pattern on the wall but at about age 16 my boyfriend at the time and I did that to his bedroom, in order to facilitate the ideal background for tripping, so it would be freaky in the extreme in the babies room.

What colour do you think I should choose?

I can't stop thinking about the dolphins at Percuil and what made them flee the deep water. I'm really sad about it.

I spent all my summers at my Grandparents house as a child, very near to the Percuil river in a little village called Treverva. I know the area where they were stranded really well. I don't know why that makes things worse, but it really does.

I'm angry with the navy because I think things are pointing towards it being their fault. If there were live firing exercises, which it appears there were, it's no wonder the dolphins freaked and swam inland. Seventy dolphins don't just decide to go into low waters for no reason whatsoever.

There's some vague talk of a killer whale scaring them, but I just don't believe that. Although killer whales are predators of dolphins they don't scare a whole pod of seventy. I feel sure it has something to do with the naval exercises in Falmouth harbour.

I don't see why we have to have submarine exercises in the first place. Quite frankly I'd rather we had safe dolphins.

On words being twisted.

A long time ago women used to be attended in birth by a group of close women friends called God-sibbs, sometimes translated as 'sisters of God'.

Apparently, this gathering of women to give birth and assist each other has been distorted in the lens of time and became the root of the word 'gossip'.

I feel cross that such a lovely thing has been so distorted.

For crying out loud stop talking about babies Lula.

I think I need to make little cards for everyone exempting them from having to listen to me boring on and on about babies. I think I might start to lose friends. I'm starting to bore myself.

But the thing is, when you're this big, all you really can think about is how moving around is much more of a hassle than it should be, you're knackered all the time, you hurt - Oh the list is endless.

And then there is the whole birth thing - don't even get me started on the birth thing unless you have a tissue handy, I get so angry and ranty and tearful. It is frustrating ands annoying that the western world seems to treat birth as if it is a difficult, medical issue that always goes wrong and is fraught with problems. It is hard to believe that women have been having babies since time immemorial when the thought of a big baby sends the whole medical world into a big spasm of panic. Oh my god, the baby is a bit on the large size, no birthing centre for this mother.

In this country it is the law that a woman can demand to have her baby anywhere she likes and a midwife must attend. I could demand to have my baby in a phone box if I felt like it. But apparently I can't have my baby in the birthing centre, because my baby doesn't fit into their statistical average measurements. Because my baby is big I have two choices, have it in the delivery suite and labour on the labour ward, or have it at home.

But wait...I wanted to go to the birthing centre because it is 'halfway' between home and hospital. It is reassuringly still a little bit medical, but mostly comforting and relaxing. How can it possibly be safer for me to have my baby at home? Of course if you ask western medicine they'll say it isn't, some hospitals still call home birth 'child abuse' but they have to let me if I want to.

And I think I do want to.

I cenrtainly do not want to labour on a ward full of other labouring women, feeling like I'm ill in hopsital and then get shifted to a delivery suite where they are hurrying you up and timing you and monitoring the baby constantly. Statistically women are much more likely to have interventions (forceps, episiotomies, etc) in hospital than they do at home. At least at home you can take your own time and manage as you see fit your own pain, there is no-one pressuring you to be quieter, to have an epidural.

That said, two of my friends have had hosptial births and caesareans which went really well for them. Oh, it's so confusing.

So there's the thing.

I'm open to opinion and discussion on it.

Amazement.



This is a 4D scan of our 31 week old baby inside me. A lovely friend used up some favours and arranged for us to have a scan for free (they usually cost about £300 and people who have their babies privately have them done).

Isn't it just totally gobsmacking?

Hey, Dollface.

This is a Bratz doll:



And she looks like she's had very bad cosmetic surgery. Dolls for children generally have idealised faces - pert noses, big eyes, the stereotype of perfect beauty. But how can bad cosmetic surgery have become the idea of perfection? Am I just being old and crabby and not seeing the inner beauty of having oversized blown up lips or something?

I've currently got one male child and one baby of unknown gender in my belly. It could be a girl and if it is I really don't want dolls like this to be a part of her life. But then as a parent you're faced with the difficult decision. Do you be the unkind Mum, the one who says no to the toys all the other kids have got, or do you allow your female child to be indoctrinated from a very early age into the fine art of the female form Hollywood stylee?

Hamleys has recently been shown up for dividing it's toys into gender stereotypes - pink and baby dolls for girls, Dr Who for boys. Female children are given really dull toy choices; kitchens and pretend cashiers tills and dolls that wee themselves whereas the boys are presented with toys that make them think and become spacially aware; geomag, lego, meccano. I know boys toys are stereotyped too - macho fighting characters and guns and such but I think that the lack of imagination, the belief that all the girls will need to aspire to is looking beautiful, having babies and working in a shop really should have been long gone from the toy industry. But instead of getting better, it appears to be getting worse.

I really, really don't think little girls should be given dolls which look nothing like any kind of realistic female, let alone ones which wear kinky sexy clothes as a matter of routine. I know that when I was a little girl we had Sindy and Barbie - dolls with very long legs and tiny waists, and tiny noses and huge eyes.



But Sindy dolls still look childlike, especially when you look at them with an adult eye. In fact in finding that picture I am quite surprised at how childish her face is. I remembered her to be more 'adult' more elegant and beautiful. No Bratz doll these days would have the same cute chubbiness.

Barbie, whilst also looking very doll-like has, redeemingly, at least had several careers including:

Astronaut, Doctor, Dentist, Aerobics Instructor, Fire Fighter, Athlete, Police Woman, Scientist, Business Woman, Flight Attendant, Teacher, Tap Dancer, Soldier.

If the Bratz dolls had done these things they might not be so bad, but the Bratz dolls are flower girlz and movie starz and pop divaz and pixiez. They like slumber parties.

So they look like pornographically stylised versions of women and they spend their time doing glitzy fame jobs with no real substance, or being fairies.

They annoy me.

Badly.

On not saying, "Hurry Up" all the time.

When I was a little girl my Mum always used to say, "You've got two speeds, slow and stop." But I remember dashing about everywhere, always in a hurry.

Now I find myself chivvying TLB along, "Come on, hurry up, get a move on."

I know children have a tendency to dawdle and daydream, to stare out the window when they should be getting dressed but I don't think they're that different to adults.

I think the difference is that adults monitor children. They're constantly waiting for them, telling them what to do. Nobody monitors adults.

Nobody is waiting for me to hurry up and get in the car, I make the decision about how long it takes me to do a thing. But children don't get to do anything for themselves. "Go and have a bath and hurry up, make it a business bath, not a play bath." "Eat your dinner quickly", "Get dressed, you'll be late for school".

They never get to do anything at their own speed.

I suppose it could just be me, being impatient, but I hear it everyday in the street, in the playground and it can't be that all children are inherently slow.

It must be us with an eye to our watches thinking they're slow when in fact they probably don't take any longer than we do.

Apart, of course, from when they have to get up in the morning. Or clean their teeth. Or finsh their dinner. Etc, etc, ad finitum.

I don't understand how Easter works. Why do the dates keep changing? I think there is a person in an office somewhere, sticking a pin in a calendar with their eyes shut, going, "I would like Easter to be now".

Labels: confusion, Easter

On why it is not OK to look pregnant when you are pregnant.

I have discovered that the perception of feminine bodily perfection covers many stages of a woman's life and is not just limited to the youthful female form.

Pregnancy, it seems, does not escape judgement. A pregnant woman should apparently put on very litte weight, carry her bump high, appear almost unpregnant from the back and have many people say how compact and neat her pregnancy is.

For me and the throngs of women I see at the maternity hospital, this is bad news. Our general weight gain and roundness and the fact that we actually look like we are pregnant seems apparently to count against us.

But I don't want to look like I'm not pregnant. I am pregnant! I have put on a bit of weight, some of my weight has moved around but I'm building a baby! I don't want to be compared to anyone with regard to the shape of my body, and especially not to naturally thin women who carry their baby in a neat rugby ball stuffed up their jumper (although this, for info, is apparently the definition of pregnancy perfection).

The zeitgeist seems to be small bumps. It's all 'Sporty Mum's! Women who run marathons right up until they're 10cm dilated! Wear your old clothes all the way through your pregnancy!' No celebration of normality, no deference to the complicated business of what's going on inside, it's all about how we look on the outside. I don't understand the seemingly constant desire to minimise the size of women; the definition of perfection is getting smaller and smaller. It really feels like the ideal would be for us all to be tiny little Alices in a world full of tall and manly men.

It's not just the media either. A colleague at work is five months pregnant but has lost a stone in weight because she's been so ill with morning sickness. Another colleague said to me, "Doesn't she look fabulous? You'd hardly know she was five months pregnant. She's carrying the baby really neatly!" Neatly! But she lost a stone in weight from being unable to hold down food, at a time in her life when the food you eat is even more vital than usual. That is not fabulous.

I think that women are judged physically at every point in their lives; as children we are picked (or not picked) to be May Queens, teenagers think size zero is the height of aspiration, the twenty somethings try diet after diet and are encouraged to eat cereal instead of lunch in order to drop a dress size. Shouldn't pregnancy be the one time when this pressure stops? Is not even pregnancy sacred?

Weight gain in pregancy has to do with many things like having some reserves for breastfeeding. It's normal and natural and it makes me really sad to be part of a society where it feels like women may not even bloom during pregancy. The ideal pregancy shouldn't be anything. It shouldn't be tiny, thin women with bumps on their fronts, looking as much like they're not pregnant as is humanly possible, it should just be women, being pregnant in their own way and shape carrying their babies to term in the way that their body chooses.

Labels: body size, pregnancy, pregnant, shape, women

The Lure of Money.

I grew up with very little money. We skimped to buy things, we had second hard clothes, we didn't have fancy holidays. I had dinner tickets and vouchers from the government for school clothes. I was envious of the children who had money, of the ones who lived in fancy old houses with big gardens, even envious of the ones whose parents were probably only on average incomes because to me as a child that seemed like a lot.

But I wasn't unhappy. I still did interesting things, and I got presents and we had fun and sometimes went on trips as a family. I didn't equate a lack of money with a lack of happiness, I just wished I lived in a nicer house and my Mum didn't have to get upset about bills and court orders, and charges from the bank.

Now I'm an adult I've seen both sides of the coin. For a brief period I've lived with money; not having to add up the shopping in the supermarket, not checking the price of things before you buy them, shopping in Waitrose. And I've lived through periods of extreme poverty; being thousands of pounds in debt, being on the dole with all the money gone and no access to any more, scrabbling in the bottom of handbags to cobble together enough change to buy a loaf of bread from the local corner shop.

Of course when I haven't got money I wish I had some, but I very rarely wish I had heaps. I don't dream of winning the lottery and having millions. I dream of being able to afford a little house in the country and some chickens.

I think my goals are realistic. And more importantly, I have have come to realise that I am very lucky to have, as a reference for normality, the feeling of living with a distinct lack of money.

What I have learned is that money is something that is nice to have, but one doesn't always have it.

The other side to that is to live with money. There are people I know who have grown up in very wealthy circumstances. The sorts of people whose fathers had top jobs and they lived in classy, elegant parts of London. There was not scrimping in their houses, and never doing without. They had lovely holidays and learnt how to ski and surf and travelled all over the world as part of their everyday existence. And of course as expected they went on to run succesful businesses and to continue to be the sorts of people who accumulate money.

But I have noticed something. I have noticed that sometimes that wealth is taken away from them; their businesses fail or they make some bad financial decisions and suddenly they find themselves at the bottom of the pile, struggling to find the cost of a pint of milk, borrowing from friends, having people bail them out.

And they can't handle it at all. The lack of money, for someone who has always had money and has never thought about it, becomes a huge impossible hurdle and they will do almost anthing to try and rectify the situation.

I have seen people move in with people they don't really like or take highly paid jobs that they utterly hate and that wear them out and wear them down. They convince themselves that this is the solution because the lure of money, the fear of being poor for them is so strong it overides everything else in their lives.

So they end up with money again. Given the choice between a highly paid job that doesn't suit them or a job with a tiny salary that would delight their heart they always chose the money. They choose to live with people who do not make them happy but who are rich, rather than having to count the pennies with someone who would probably end up thrilling them.

And I look at those choices they make and I feel really glad to have lived the way I have, to have wanted for things and to have known what it is like not to be able to afford washing powder and to have to use washing up liquid instead to wash my socks. Because now I have one thing that people who have grown up with wealth don't have and will never be able to get:

I have the the knowledge that is possible to lead a wonderful, full and happy life with very little money, because I have done so.

And it is.

Labels: love, lure, lust, money

My life has become a series of mad appointments happening one after another with very little time to breathe in between.

And I've been gassing on LJ.

But new year, new people, new resolution to keep up with writing here.

I have a lot of things I want to write about. I just don't know what the point of this blog is anymore. Is it just reportage or is it for more creative writing?

Absence makes the heart depart to a tiny room and sit gently in the corner. Possibly rocking.

In my head there is a area which is specifically occupied with loving those whom I love. I do not need to command it, it just carries on, everyday, everynight, functioning efficently in order to be sure that the love continues. It's a little bit like a W.I. group. It's very good at making things remain pretty. It always changes the flowers and sweeps up and makes cakes and there are lovely smells and interesting talks and thoughtful ideas and general all round niceness.

Within that area there are rooms specifically occupied by the presence of the people I love. They exist only so that I may visit when the people who occupy them are not physically near me. In there are the best memories; the best smells, the smiles, my favourite images. All the things I would not need if the person I wanted was near to me.

Usually when a person goes at first I just keep the door of their room shut; things are easier that way. But the other day I opened it just a tiny little bit, and was somehow sucked in. And now, increasingly, I find myself spending my waking and sleeping hours there.

Labels: absence, love

On animals that know things

Part Three.

If you take a Queen Bee away from her hive, the bees that are left find one of her larvae and turn it into a new Queen. They do this by feeding the larvae royal jelly until they hatch. When this new Queen hatches she looks around for all the other larvae that could potentially become Queens and eats them all up.

So the bees can make a Queen. presumably, when she hatches they are bow to her in beely submission and say in tiny bee voices, "You are are new Queen." But she's not all that special really, to me. They are much more special for making her as a replacement for the one they lost.

On Animals That Know Things

Part One:

Guinea Pigs are afraid of aeroplanes. This is possibly because if you are a Guinea Pig an aeroplane looks very much like a Condor and a Condor to a Guinea Pig is a very scary thing indeed, owing in part to its tendency to be rather partial to Guinea Pig meat and in part to it's expert flying ability.

My Mum's Guinea Pigs have never met a Condor, nor lived in a place that Condors frequent. But if an aeroplane flies overhead or the shadow of a thing passes over their heads they run for cover. How do they know to do that? Is there a gene in Guinea Pigs which can identify large flying things looking for food? Is the shape of a Condor somehow passed down from generation to generation?

Part Two:

In the Lake District the sheep are forgetting.

They have forgotten the little paths to the high grass and they have forgotten how to get back down from the high pastures when they are up there. This is because the sheep that have died from disease have not been replaced with local, or knowledgeable sheep, but instead new foreign sheep have been brought in and they do not know the way. This sounds silly, but if there is a little tiny footpath up to high pastures the sheep pass the route down from generation to generation. Without that Sheepy, local knowledge the farmers are finding their sheep are getting stuck. But what fascinates me is not the poor stuck sheep, but how they were passing down the information in the first place.

On things being A Long Way away.

If you live in the country you grow up knowing that to get to the good places you have to travel A Long Way. You also know that A Long Way can mean up to twenty miles. For example, when I was a teenager (which was A Long Time Ago, never mind A Long Way) if you wanted to go shopping in Top Shop in Cambridge but you lived in a little village fifteen miles outside, then you had to get your Mum to drive you, you had to learn to drive yourself or you had to get a bus which came once every hour and took an hour.

If you wanted to go swimming you had to get the same bus. If you wanted to go to a decent 'youth' pub, you had to get the same bus. You had to get that bus to go to the library, to go to a gallery, to the cinema, to the theatre. That bus was your friend and the journey time became part of your day to day life. You came to accept that to get places takes time.

I know this. I am a country girl.

In the city, everything is near. The shops are near, there is a cinema nearby either in your local area, or in the city centre. There's a library, a chemist, a gallery if you fancy it, a skatepark (a skatepark! Can you imagine!) and a swimming pool. There is so much nearby that if you choose to travel a little bit further to get somewhere it shocks city people. "But that's A Long Way!" they say. "Why don't you choose one a little bit nearer?"

But you see, as I say, I'm a country girl. I don't think four miles is A Long Way. I think four miles is a perfectly acceptable distance to drive to Scouts, even if there is a troupe nearer to me. It's a normal, everyday distance to travel.

You can see this slight overestimation of distance in people who think the other side of a twenty mile city is A Long Way. Country people don't think this; I used to drive a fifteen mile journey just to pick up my best friend on the way to the pub. And a country person will happily drive twenty miles to pick up something from Freecycle, but a city person won't. They're so used to having everything on hand they don't appreciate that people all over the world don't live ten minutes away from coffeeshops and galleries.

It's a state of mind which comes from never having to worry; evidenced also in a city person's attitude to buses. City people have no concept of missing the bus, because there is always another bus. Even the Sunday service means that a bus comes every eight minutes. City people moan about this; they think eight minutes is a long time to wait. To a country person, only having to wait eight minutes for a bus is the height of decadence. In the country people really run to catch a bus because they know that there won't be another one for at least an hour and in fact sometimes, in the smaller villages, there won't be another one for a day.

A bus a day. If your plans rely on catching that it makes you hyper-aware of the time.

And God forbid if you live in the country and you miss the bus after a night out on the town. If you miss the last bus then you're really, truly stumped because there's no way you can afford a cab. The only way to get home is to get your Mum to come and collect you, but mine lives in Somerset and besides, I'm a bit old for that.

Which is about where we came in, isn't it?

Labels: buses, city, country, distance, travel

Back once again...

Well it's taken some time but I'm back on line with this little blog, just trying to work out now what to do with it. I think I want a site that contains everything, links to my Flickr account and a direct blog every day on the main page. Plus links to the jewellery and all sorts. That means changing my address and all sorts of complications. I might have to consult the Aunt Rosie of Knowage.

So whilst I think about that, look at this:



Oh dear. Look how happy he is chewing! Look how bewildered he is when his food is nicked! And where did that duck come from?

It is a duck isn't it?

I can't be doing with all this feeling sad about things. About inanimate objects and about nature programmes and when I hear music and anything sentimental. It seems as though a piece of me has been reprogrammed to blub at the slightest opportunity and it's very undignified and costing a lot in tissues.

This evening we watched an ancient film called Silent Running. It was made in 1972 and it's about a world without forests and plants, a world where the only ones left are in bio-domes in big space-freighters somewhere near Saturn.

(Don't read any further if you don't want MASSIVE spoilers, like..er..the ending)

Then Earth gives the call to blow the domes up - they can't afford to keep them running anymore and any hope of repopulating the Earth with the plants is long gone. But one crazy dude has been looking after the forests in the bio-dome for eight years and he decides, "No! I will not blow these forests up!" So he kills off his crew and sets to work looking after the forests with these three droids called Drone 1, 2 and 3. But then one droid gets swept away as the freighter travels through Saturn's Rings which is quite sad because the drone's leg gets left behind. But the worst bit is that in the end the crazy dude loses it and decides to kill himself, but before he does he sends the bio-dome off into space with Drone 3 in it, looking after all the plants. But he doesn't let Drone 2 go too even though they're friends, because Drone 2 is injured and can't help Drone 1, even though he could still have been company. So Drone 1 goes off into eternity on his own.

Now I write that it doesn't seem so sad, but believe me, it's heartbreaking. And that's what I can't stand. Lions in the wild killing elephants is devastating, and baby penguins dying, and lonely droids and sad things on the news...

I'm becoming a liability with all this over-feeling.

And I wish I could just switch off the bit of me that felt sad about things like that, about nature and inanimate objects. Just cut it out. Because I wouldn't mind looking at the bit of brain left behind on the table, not if it stopped me from feeling sad all the time.

The things you find when you sort.

Sometimes I think my Mum could give Mr Trebus a run for his money, so much stuff does she hoard. She keeps and keeps; empty tea light holders because she might refill them one day and weird looking screws and more seeds than perhaps even God had to start the world with. Every surface in her house has things on it, it's hard to find a space to put anything down.

So about once a year things get a bit on top of her and she can't even find a place to put her cup of tea down so I go and help her sort it all out. We sort it all into the right places and we take stuff to the charity shop and the tip and I say, "You have to be ruthless, RUTHLESS!" quite a lot and she pretends to put stuff in the charity box but then secretly takes it back out again.

We spent yesterday doing this. I like it because I like to help her and she is so happy when she can see the sideboard and the kitchen tops and the coffee-table again. And I like to find surprising items and old things I had forgotten about and I like the stories she tells me whilst we do it.

So yesterday I am doing this. I am removing all of my Auntie's old glasses from a cupboard so that I can clean it and move it and rearrange things a bit and I am saying, "What's this?" and she's saying, "Oh, that's an ashtray my first husband made." or "Oh, that's the part for something I have lost" and things like that.

And then I find a tall rectangular parcel wrapped in brown paper on the very top of the cabinet, right at the back. So I pick it up and it's really heavy and it's all dusty, and I blow the dust off the top and I say, "What's this?"

And she looks at the parcel, and then she looks at me and she says, "Ah. That's Grandma."

On looking forward to Autumn.

For a while now Autumn has been in the back of my mind, looming like the sore patch before a spot comes and I haven't been looking forward to it. I've been watching the edges of the leaves brown, nothing seems to be alive in our garden anymore. This is an exaggeration because we've got slugs coming out of our ears and they must be eating something, but the garden feels a bit over somehow. The sunflowers have died and even though we haven't harvested the potatoes and the carrots and the courgettes, the plants they are attached to are nearly finished. My Dad used to say he disliked August because everything was grey instead of green, used up and losing it's beauty and I feel a bit like that.

But now I've got my camera things feel different. I can't wait for the leaves to turn, for the berries to ripen. For the clear crisp mornings that only Autumn brings. It is a lovely time to visually document and I am excited about having the opportunity to do it so thank you Life for giving me this camera, I look forward to doing you justice in using it.

On wishing my Dad was in the camera shop with me.

I nearly lost it in the camershop when I went to buy my camera. You know when the tears suddenly rush itnto your eyes and you get a huge sob in your throat and you can't quite hold it in, so you end up making a horrible nggggh sound, well that happened. And I really felt overwhelmed with the choices and I wanted to wail, "I wish my Dad was here, he'd have known which one to buy, he would have helped meeeee".

But then I managed to pull myself together and act like the adult woman I am instead of whinging and snivelling about something that wasn't going to change.

So now I have a beautiful camera.

I am a little bit afraid of it.

My sister took a lovely picture of me on it.

TLB took a lovely picture of my sister on it.

I just keep looking at it and feeling a bit sick about the amount of money it cost, because the macro lens was about 300 quid and that's without the camera body. But I need it! It now means I can take photos of the jewellery we make and not pay anyone else extortionate amounts of cash to do it for us.

If I can ever figure it out.

The Hedgehog.

Twenty days ago.

The lovely boy and I are out cycling and we find a baby hedgehog right in the middle of the cycle path, in the middle of the day in the boiling hot sun. He isn't moving much and doesn't look very well and he has little white fly eggs all around his eye and his ear. We look at him for a bit and some people walk past and look at him too and then carry on. I ask one of them if they have a box or a bag, but they react like I am a crazy woman. We stand there for a bit and I say, "Well, we can't leave him here" so TLB takes his T-shirt off and I wrap the hedgehog up in it so he doesn't prickle me. Then we cycle to the park, me holding onto the handlebars one-handed, because I am carrying the hedgehog aloft in the other.

"Precious cargo", TLB says.

We go to the park and we find a park ranger. I show him the hedgehog and he tells me to take him home and give him some water.
"I'm a member of the British Hedgehog Protection Society", I say. I'm not sure why.
"He's in good hands then" he says.

So we take him home and TBM has a look at him and sprays him with water and the hedgehog seems to like that, and then I have a look online and find out that it is quite likely the hedgehog has lungworm. I ring the vet and explain what has happened and they think we should bring him in, so we put him in a box and get in the car. All the way there TLB holds the box sending the hedgehog all the energy he can.

"A very important job." he says.

The vet takes him in because they have a special wild animal fund which means they can care for him, and they give him saline and lungworm antibiotics. The first night we all cross our fingers and I ring in the morning. The nurse tells me that he'd had a good night. "But he's not out of the woods yet", she says, "he's very weak."

The next morning I ring again and she says he is really doing alright. "The lungworm medicine takes nineteen days to work" she says, "ring back then and you can release him into your garden, or back where you found him."

Everyday TLB asks about the hedgehog and I tell him what they'd said. "He's doing well, he's having his medicine."

***

So then on the twentieth day, which is today I call back.

"I'm so sorry," the lady on the phone says. "Did they not ring? I did tell them to to ring you, but I only work part time."

She tells me he died, three days after the medicine started and that it was sudden and suprising and that they had thought that he was doing really well.

She tells me they were all very sad about it and I tell her that I am too.

****

Poor little hedgehog.

On standing by your own actions in body, mind and name.

Dear anonymous person,

I see your point, I do. You're right. I do feel guilty. I feel ashamed of myself and angry. I do not think I did a big or clever thing. I am not protesting 'too much', I am taking my punishment which includes the loss of my car and I have learned my lesson. The people I hit were not hurt, there were no 'crying children' and they had insurance which is covering their car. I was driving at 10mph at the top of my road, so very close to the allowable limit that the poplice wanted me to take a blood test as it might let me off. I refused that test. I owned up to drinking the minute I got out of the car and I am proud of that. The police said that the court was as lenient as they had ever seen, as much as they could be. I was not some 10 times over the limit drunk, caring nothing and driving at 80mph, I was driving away from a horrible arguement because I had nowhere else to go. These are my reasons, but they are not excuses. I know what I did was wrong and stupid and dangerous.

I will not do it again.


Now about you.

You are hiding under the tag of anonymous, making judgements about people without revealing your own hand. If you are someone I know then I wish I didn't; my true friends and my family have told me how they feel and it's not all good, I would not wish for a friend who could not say to my face what you have said here.

If you are someone I do not know, then who are you to judge? Have you never done wrong? Never made a mistake? Come and walk a mile in my shoes, I welcome you.

It's safe there in anonymous bliss, isn't it? Easy to sit and judge, hiding behind the letters, no-one to look you in the face.

But if I were you, sitting there, typing unkind words to a person whilst keeping my identity secret, I would be feeling distinctly uncomfortable about myself. I have not hidden from what I did. You however appear to hide constantly.

Well I'm not going to prison. I've been banned from driving for a year and I've been fined.

The car isn't repairable and the car man says I was lucky not to be more hurt. So now I owe money on finance for a car I no longer have because it wasn't insured.

I'm glad I'm not going to prison.

I shall be doing a lot of cycling.

And to the person that made the anonymous comment hoping that I did go to prison and saying there is no reason to ever drive drunk, well, actually, there is. In a court of law special circumstances can be granted (if you ask for them) if you are a female trying to get away from a man you fear. Obviously that is not what happened to me beause I was not fearing anyone, I was just horribly upset, but I thought you might like to know that in case you feel the need to make a judgement another time in your life.

The moral of the mysterious returning wallet.

Well. He giveth, then he taketh away, and then he giveth again.

A elderly asian gent knocked on our door yesterday and handed TBM back his wallet. Indside was everything, including the coin.

TBM wept.

The man's English was very limited, but apparently a child found it (in the vague direction points behind our house). I am so grateful for the lovely people who return things and who make up for the gits who steal.

Possibly, the price I have paid for praying to the Gods that the wallet be returned is as follows:

The night before the wallet came back I smashed my car up into smithereens after a horrible row with TBM. He told me to leave and I was drunk so I got in my car and I tried to drive it and instead I smashed it up. Now it's in some garage costing £12 for everyday it stays there, plus 300 quid for the fact that it was taken there. I very much doubt it's fixable.

Worse than this, the insurance I thought I had I didn't actually have, due to some confusion with my broker. So now I am a criminal; drunk driving, driving without insurance. I have to go to court on Friday.

The moral of this story?

Smashing the car could be the price I paid for praying.

However, it's far more likey to have occurred because actually I am a complete and utter twat. If I go to prison, please send me sweets and a Shiv.