(New) Life Begins At 40: Month Eight
Things that go together well – salt and vinegar, Marks and Spencer, Jews and talking loudly.
Things that don’t go together at all – pregnancy and heatwaves.
I was fine when the weather started to get warm last month. Lots of people trotted out the old cliche to me: “Ooh, it must be difficult being pregnant in the heat.”
I’d truthfully respond: “Not really. It’s just as difficult as it usually is.”
However, once the weather started to dance around the 30C mark this month, life became truly disgusting. London in extreme heat is awful anyway; instead of a pleasant sea breeze, you get slapped in the mush with extra-hot pollution fumes. The air conditioning at work broke as the heatwave started, making things even worse.
Once you have to carry a bowling ball around in your stomach with at all times, very hot weather becomes even more unwelcome. My usual ten-minute stride from the tube to home has turned into a painfully long, nonagenarian-style crawl, a 20-minute shuffle of embarrassment as I muster up all the gusto of a snail on valium to get to the comfort of my sofa. If you’d like to volunteer to push me around in a shopping trolley for the last few weeks of my pregnancy, please get in touch (NB: it needs to be a large trolley).
Before the hot weather happened, we went on babymoon, a genuine holiday for parents-to-be and definitely not, as my Dad put it, “another one of those things you’ve made up”. We went to Cornwall and had a lovely time eating a lot of fish and ice-cream and getting massages. Our next holiday is likely to take place in 2025, when we’ll finally be able to leave the house with bubs.
Until then, my immediate task is to get to grips with the fact that I’m about to become a mum. The baby’s head is engaged, the hospital bags are packed and I’m about to go on maternity leave. All I need to do now is work out what on earth you do with a baby.
