Brave New World

Hmm, well – apologies to my regular reader, I’m afraid I haven’t been keeping this up at all and Rach is now over seven months pregnant. A lot has happened but all good so far so I’ll try to put up some catch-ups over the next week or so, starting with….

4 months ago: Babies everywhere!
A fiend of ours who has recently had a baby (the lovely Jem) was visiting one of her friends just down the road from us, also totally babied-up. So on Saturday morning we went down to Kew to visit them both. We took a walk and went to Starbucks where we got our first glance at another world. It was like looking through the Looking Glass, stepping through the Wardrobe or wandering “beyond the fields we know” all of a sudden. We entered an alternate universe populated entirely by mothers and babies – the only exceptions being a sprinkling of fathers queuing to place the orders. Manoeuvring around the café was virtually impossible, and there were several nasty looking baby-jams (not a conserve made from babies, for those worried about Starbuck’s business ethics) where the well-to-do parents of West London had entirely blocked aisles with the bull-bars on their prams interlocking awkwardly. Perhaps I’m exaggerating – to be fair, in some of the prams there was barely room for a medium-sized chauffeur.  

It was a terrible journey to our table with the coffees – plus I nearly forgot the baby cappuccino (a bit of frothed milk in a min cup – free, unlike Mr Tottey’s ‘baby wipe’ ice-cream which far from being a thoughtful baby-friendly measure was actually just a way of wringing a few more pennies from the impoverished inhabitants of West Kirby, but that’s very much another story) and had to dive back to the counter to get one before I’d gone too far. I couldn’t have made the trip twice.

It seems if you’re up and about early enough – a novelty for me and Rach – everybody is a parent and child. And once you’ve had the fairy balm rubbed in your eyes you never see the world the same way again (actually, in folklore the fairies tended to poke out your eyes once this happened, hopefully there is no cabal of parents waiting to do the same to us). It now appears that most women are in fact pregnant all of the time. I don’t know how this isn’t more widely known, as my recent sampling indicates it is definitely true. Everywhere I look I am surrounded by Pregnants (as I believe they are known)! It’s a new and scary (not to mention noisy and crowded) world that we’re entering.

But I suppose on the plus side – we’re obviously not alone…