JENNIFER SELWAY Baffling craze for crazy birth plans
MI5 wants to recruit mums as part-time agents. This is a genius idea because as all children know, mums have eyes in the backs of their heads which means they can spy unobserved!
Plus, they are brilliant at the thousand-yard stare which can stun a badlybehaved eight-year-old, and is a deadly weapon far superior to 007’s Walther PPK. Mums, the nation’s security is safe in our hands!
THISYEAR’SA-LEVELS were marked harder than during Covid, even though grade inflation has been skewing results for years. Do you remember a time long ago when exams were just “marked”, without an agenda or any attempt at social engineering?
Anyway, the unrealistically high marks given out during the pandemic resulted in thousands of sixth formers going to universities where they have found they cannot cope with the demands of their courses.
More than 30,000 students dropped out last year, a rise of nine per cent on the previous year.
This is a terrible waste of young people’s time and the university’s resources.why were students deluded into believing they were university material? Not everyone is. It’s a pity the impulse to be nice to kids struggling with A-levels under Covid (by marking them too generously) didn’t extend to keeping the schools open.
RYANAIR charged a couple £110 to print their boarding passes as they’d mistakenly printed their return passes by mistake. Unbelievable. When did it become the rule that airline passengers had to do all the work, bar fly the plane?
RESEARCHERS at British Columbia University identified three types of straight men – Neo-traditionalists who follow traditional roles, Egalitarians who “seek an equal partnership” and Progressives “who work on building gender equity in their partnership through regular purposeful conversation with their partner”. My own study (a lifetime of talking to girlfriends on the phone) reveals all men start off as earnest Progressives for the first few dates, drift into being Egalitarians who bore on about changing nappies and end up as Neo-traditionalists who, at least, put the bins out.
WE HAD the nice man from pest control round last week to take care of a wasps’ nest. In my violent and vengeful way I’d hoped he would turn up with a flame thrower but instead he quietly applied some insecticide which he said would render the wasps “inert”. “When you say ‘inert’ do you mean ‘dead’?”, I asked. “Well, yes”, he admitted.
It occurred to me, perhaps “dead” is no longer an acceptable word in pest control circles for fear it might trigger sensitive clients. It won’t be long before someone talks about wasps “passing”.
GEORGE HARRISON’S mum Louise, pictured with him above, was a prolific letter writer, corresponding with many Beatles fans in the 1960s. A selection of the letters she wrote to teenager Janet Gray is being auctioned in Liverpool later this month.
But Louise didn’t always approve of fans’ behaviour. In one letter she writes: “Last Wednesday I went to Manchester and I was really disgusted at the way the so-called fans just screamed right through the whole of the Beatles act.
“Nobody with any sense would pay and queue for a ticket just to stand on a seat and scream and not hear one sound from the stage. I was really ashamed I was a female.”
I felt a bit bad reading this. I saw the Beatles at Wembley when I was 11. My dad took me and my friend and it was probably the most exciting event in my life (and still is...) As soon as the Beatles ran on stage every silly girl in the auditorium screamed and screamed and screamed. Nobody could hear a note. What a waste. My dad looked at us and rolled his eyes.
He and Louise would have got on famously.
AAT LAST, an old-fashioned news story, the sort that would have had street vendors shouting “read all about it!” in times gone by.
Yes, there has been a jewel theft at the British Museum and it is likely that it was an “inside job”.
After a summer news diet of the cost-of-living crisis and the Bibby Stockholm barge, this old school caper has cheered me up no end.
WOMAN from Manchester called Iuliia Gurzhii wanted to have a natural birth… on a beach. To which you have to ask, why? There are three things to do on a beach: read paperbacks, lie in the sun and throw stones in the water. That’s it. And don’t get me started on those stupid games involving bats and balls on elastic. Even eating on a beach risks the presence of sand in your sarnies.
So why in the name of all that’s sane does anyone want to give birth on a beach? There’s nothing natural about it. It’s the sort of thing that happens to unlucky women in war zones – something to avoid at all costs. The very thought of sand near the business end when you’re giving birth makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable.
Iuliia and her husband Clive flew to the Caribbean when she was 35 weeks pregnant hoping to tick giving-birth-on-a-beach off her preposterous bucket list.
Martinique was her preferred island but the weather was bad so they picked up a boat to Grenada.
Unfortunately Iuliia’s waters broke while on board and she gave birth somewhere off the coast of St Lucia. Baby Louisa was born safe and well and Clive said that although it wasn’t a beach, Iuliia had been able to “connect with the universe”. Nice.
Unfortunately the authorities – such as the UK High Commission – have been far less obliging than the universe, leaving the couple stranded in St Lucia, unable to register the birth or get the baby a passport. Iuliia says she is traumatised and the couple, fast running out of money and food ,“feel like prisoners”.
My guess is that most birth plans are rapidly shelved within five seconds of feeling that first labour pain. Mine certainly were.
But the look-at-me excesses of some new parents are unbelievable, mostly thanks to social media and encouraged by people like Love Island star Olivia Attwood who said the other day that when she and footballer Bradley Dack have a baby she would like the event filmed. Yuk.
Childbirth isn’t an Instagram-able photo opportunity. Even in the world of modern medicine it can be dangerous and unpredictable.
The priority should be to get your baby in to the world, not to fly 4,000 miles or set up a film shoot.
I’m reminded of that line in the Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up which is about an unplanned pregnancy and the couple’s birth plan.
“If you want a special experience,” snaps the doc, “go to a Jimmy Buffett concert.”