Babes on a Plane

Before ash clouds and cabin crew staff strikes and recession I read that a couple of airlines were thinking of introducing child free flights. It seems that they thought that childless, lone adults or child loathing passengers would pay an extra few quid to not have to be near horrible sticky whinging children on a long haul flight. Fair enough, if there's a market- but why not go the whole hog- why not have child only flights? I bet the air staff will be queuing up to get on that rota. You think I’m joking? No sir, I am not. Think about it. Which one would you rather work in? Intolerant Adult Airways (the child-free option) or Lord of the Fliers (the child-only option).


For me, there's no contest. The other week the world heard about US air steward Steven Slater who did what so many of us have dreamed of and quit his job with a flourish and jumped out the plane door. Don’t panic- the plane was on the ground at the time. This happened after he had just one too many spats with an awkward passenger who refused to sit down when all passengers were told to remain in their seats whilst the plane taxied. Instead of sitting on his arse, the man proceeded to get his heavy bag out of the over head locker. When he was approached by the Steven the man ignored his pleas for good behaviour he pulled his bag down and hit the steward squarely on the head. This was after repeated polite requests to sit down from both passengers and staff. The steward lost it and exited the plane via the emergency shute, scuttled off the runway and got in his car and drove home, just in time to meet the police cars that were there to greet him for his safety and security breach.


Poor guy. What else must he have had to put up with over the years to get to this state? And here’s my question- how much worse would passengers be on a child free plane? In my opinion people who don’t like kids fall into the same category of people who don’t like cats and dogs. It’s like there is something wrong with them. Crying babies might be slightly annoying when you are trying to get to sleep, not least to their parents, but would you really want to share a cabin with 200 folk who don’t like kids or who lose it at the sound of a whimpering child? These must be the most horrible people on the planet. Why would you want to sit next to them? You’d probably have a better time at the a sleepover hosted by Fred and Rose West.


What’s more, adult passengers behave like morons on a plane (coming to a cinema near you, Samuel L. Jackson in”Morons on a Plane”). They sexually harass stewards and stewardesses, they get hammered on the free booze, they go off with strangers to have a sneaky shag in the toilets, they hog your arm rest, they recline their chair when you are trying to eat your meal on the traytable behind them and they piss all over the bathroom and leave it for someone else to clean up. In fact, I was listening to an air stewardess on the radio who said she once caught a drunken male passenger pissing all over the stewardesses seats in the galley area. And then complained when he was told to sit down!



Adult plane travellers can be the most territorial, mindless and selfish people on the planet. They don’t do what they are told, they ignore the safety briefing (except my friend Jane- who is always tempted to ask them to play it a second time in case she’s missed a bit) and they complain about mundane stuff that it wouldn’t occur to a kid to be bothered about. I have sat next to some of the most demanding and horrible people on flights and have seethed with hatred- any I didn’t even have to serve them! I have never found myself getting annoyed at a crying child.


So here it is, my business plan for Lord of the Fliers, the kids only airline . An airline where the passengers:

• Do as they are told, as they are trained to
• Are happy as long as there are cartoons on
• Think getting a free playpack with some colouring books and pens is the best thing they've ever got
• Are toilet trained (or have nappies to catch the wee in) 
• Will not bore fellow passengers with details of their divorce
• Are placated by the offer of a visit to the cockpit
• Once conked out will stay in the foetal position on the floor until their destination
• Can be controlled by the promise of sweeties
• Are never really in a hurry, so only get impatient for things that can be controlled, like “I want more sweets/cartoons” rather than having a strop because the passport control queue is too long. 
• Have no loud boorish opinions on homeland security
• Drink nothing stronger than milk 
• Don't smell of BO, just Johnson's shampoo
• Love going through turbulence cos it's like Space Mountain at Disneyland
• Aren’t going to be carrying Semtex or other explosive devices so security is a breeze.
• Are responsive to Medised (other sleep inducing concoctions masquerading as cold medicine may be available) 
• Can be placated with a hug

Ok Ok, you might have to deal with them pressing the call button repeatedly, shoving their unwanted dinner down the gaps inbetween the seats and the occasional vomit/jobbie accident but I reckon many stewardesses would gladly choose that over getting their left tit grabbed as they lean over to put someone's tray table up.



How do you deal with exasperated and impatient passengers when your kid is having a strop on an airplane?

In Utero

The thing is with our book is that it has no actual advice in it. In fact, it has anti-advice. It also doesn't talk about the birth itself, just the couple of years of aftermath. So I feel I should tackle the whole birth thing straight on.

In fact, I feel obliged to write a quick ready reckoner for all Mums to be to make up for the lack of advice in our book. Frankly, I don’t think any of those pregnancy books are telling it like it is. But don’t fear; we will.

Don't worry, friends, there are no photos of either of us crowning.

The following is to be viewed by those that are ready for the truth about childbirth or know first hand what it's like. If, like Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, "you can’t handle the truth!!”, look away now and come back in a few days time. Or go and have a look at some fluffy hippy sites and read about how magical and spiritual it all is.

Midwives

People who work in maternity units do not spend all day waltzing about with bluebirds on their shoulders and going on about how amazing the miracle of childbirth is. This is their job and they sometimes get sick of finding bits of afterbirth in their hair after a shift. As you would.

Like any workplace there are good guys and there are wanks. There are people who love their job and there are people who hate their jobs. The good guys will help you through this rather challenging time in your life and make sure you are well cared for. Given a few choice narcotics, you may even tell some of them that you love them.

The wanks will ram a loaded meds tray through your ward door without opening it first and switch the strip lights on a mere five minutes after you have dropped off to sleep after fourteen hours of labour and a sleepless night with your new baby. If that doesn’t wake you then another wank will come round and inspect your torn perineum with cold hands. Bracing!

But on the whole midwives are nice ladies and their primary job is to stop doctors coming in and making you nervous.

Doctors

If a doctor comes in the room when you are labour it will be for one of three reasons:

1. You are in big trouble. Be worried.

2. They are students who will want to do unnecessary procedures on you and your unborn for “the practice”. Remember, the chances are these people are only four or five hours clear from mainlining tequila at a drinks promotion at the University Union.

Tell them to “Fuck off”. No really; use that phrase. You’re in labour, so people expect that kind of language to be coming from your mouth. Take advantage. These students are trained to handle it. And if they are not- be part of that training yourself! That’ll be the only “practice” they get from you.

3. They are lost.

Nastiness

Your undercarriage will be rent asunder like something out of a Quentin Tarantino film. I’m not going to lie to you. You may also poo and not notice. There you go, I bet Miriam Stoppard or Dr Spock don’t tell you that! Ahh... the beautiful miracle of the human body....Birth can be summarised as peeing, pooing, bleeding, swearing and crying in a room full of strangers. It differs from a bar-room brawl in only one respect- and that is, that a kid is present...eventually.

Your relationship

Your husband may find it difficult to look at you for a few days after the event. Mainly due to item the stuff I mentioned in Nastiness, but also because in the last 24 hours you’ve called him “The biggest, most useless twat that ever lived” just because he offered you a ice-cube. You’ve forgotten about it, but it might take him a wee bit longer; he didn’t get any pethadine, after all. Even though he asked for it repeatedly. 

But there are some points when to be honest you really do hate him. No it's not because he got you into this mess, it's because you can smell the cheeky chicken pie on his breath that he had whilst nipping out of the labour room pretending to make a phone-call to your parents to "let them know how it's all going". You've not been allowed to eat for hours. How could he DO this to you?

The sweep

If you aren’t going into full blown mega labour quickly enough they will suggest a membrane sweep.

This may sound like they run a little implement like a metal detector over you, or gently stroke your belly.

But no, it’s nothing like that. A nurse is going to stick her whole hand and fingers in your lady-bits and rummage around in there like she’s looking for a lost kirby grip in a massive handbag. Effectively, she is going to claw at your cervix roughly until your baby shouts, “Okay enough already! FFS, I’m coming!”

The sweep also never works. All it does is make you feel sick, sore and violated. I swear, the membrane sweep is worse than labour itself. Pregnant ladies, if offered a membrane sweep say, "No, I read this blog once that said it was tortuous unnecessary barbaric bollocks. So, I'll just politely decline, if it's all the same to you."

If I met the woman who swept my membrane tomorrow in the street, I’d instinctively cower away from her like I was a dog whom she had once mistreated. Or punch her square in the chops.

Getting your own way

You can say “no” to people in white coats. This is a well kept secret. In fact, they pretty much have to do anything you ask. No-one tells you this. This is because it will open a whole Pandora’s box of patients asserting themselves and the health service would fall to pieces. Old ladies know this, this is why no health professionals want to work in geriatric care.

However, in the heat of battle, you may forget what it is that you want. And you may also find that only swearing will fall out of your mouth whenever you do try to communicate.

This is why I advise all pregnant friends to get t-shirts printed with the following on them:

“Bring me the finest painkillers known to humanity.”

Then everyone is clear.

So that's it- pretty much the only advice you'll get from us!

The Cocktails at Naptime Story

Once upon a time...two mums who really should have been doing housework wrote a book together....they called it "Cocktails at Naptime" and some nice Australian publishers called Finch Publishing laughed out loud when they read it on the train home and thought their readers would laugh out loud too on their trains home, possibly startling some fellow passengers along the way.

Here's their story:

Emma says:

Gillian was like Nanook from the frozen North (Aberdeen) while I was a sunburnt British ex-pat living in East Coast America. How, you may well wonder, did this unlikely duo meet on the blogosphere and decide to write a book together? Well, truth be told, it was not an instantaneous attraction but our eyes at some point met across the crowded blogosphere . I am ashamed to say my chat up was that corny old line, “I really like your blog.” Luckily she was polite enough to reply.

 At first I was suspicious. What was the matter with Gillian I wondered? She was not loud and shouty like so many people on the blogosphere. She never posted pictures of her cats or mumsy articles about how to create rainy day activities out of a thousand saved yoghurt pots. She was immature in a certain way like me, a Eurovision Contest fanatic who liked to dress in cheap spandex for non sexual purposes, yet unlike me seemed to run her family like a well organized military machine whereas I was domestically challenged, leaving the dirty washing to overflow the baskets like Mount Vesuvius and sometimes (okay a lot) getting my two daughter’s names mixed up.

So in some ways we were chalk and cheese and yet before we even disclosed we were both Capricorns (born a mere two years and ten days apart) there was a certain indefinable chemistry between us. Well I’m not sure how it happened but we realized that we were having the sort of synchronized and brilliant ideas could no longer be hidden under a bushel and before long we were telling each other we had to write a book together.

 

Now why that worked out is a bit of a mystery. Why we understood each other so well despite the fact we’ve never met in person may be partly astrological but it is also deeply geographical. For while I was born in the South and Gillian in the North we both shared the same soggy, damp landmass for many a moon. Essentially our shared heritage involves such cultural reference points as finding the royal family ludicrous, a genetic disposition to enjoy things like fried sausages and eggs without worrying about its cholesterol content, a seventies childhood involving numerous electricity strikes where we sat in the dark listening to ABBA on a portable radio and an adolescence spent dating weedy pasty men with crooked teeth (tans only briefly becoming a fashion statement in the UK in the 80’s when orangey fake tan made a debut which looked like crap unless you were a member of Wham!).

Even though we were psychic twins in many ways including a love of cheesy pop music and the fact that we both speak German it still didn’t take a genius to figure out that writing a book together in cyberspace was going to be about as easy as asking Lindsay Lohan to lay off the sauce. And yet, because we are both goats we dug our hooves in and got on with it, with bits of text flying back and forth until we had amassed something that looked distinctly like a book. And now that this book is done and dusted and filled with marvelous illustrations we’re hoping there are other mums out there – not necessarily Capricorns – who will enjoy our peculiarly skewed but perceptive views on what really happens after your midwife screams, “Mrs Mum! Take a deep breath and push. You’re crowning!”

Gillian says:

It was October 2008 and I was hatching plans for that year’s over the top Halloween costume (Marie Antoinette as I remember complete with a papier mache dead Louis XVI’s severed head in a basket) when an email popped into my inbox from someone I only knew as Emma K in the strange world of blogging.

“Hi Gillian

I always enjoy your blog and believe you are on the ball, so

I just wanted to pick your brains. So, I was wondering......”

And that was how Cocktails at Naptime started. We added the Woefully Inept bit later as we realised there was a slight theme emerging when none of us put forward any recipes for anything anyone could feasibly feed our kids or any top household tips on how to get any baby puke cleaned off of anything that would normally require dry cleaning. So, effectively what I’m saying is that email there is the evidence I need  when my own mother reads this book for the first time and gasps at all the bits about vaginas and boobs and sex so that I can point squarely in Emma’s direction and shout “She started it!”

What strikes me now, over two years on, is that what is even more bizarre than starting this tri-continental book in the first place is that we actually finished it. You see Emma and I have never met in person. Not even as I write this little epilogue as the book’s about to go into print. Yet, I feel I know Emma pretty damn well as for the past two years we have been writing and sending little funny stories and daft lists about  "Ten Ways to Hide Birthweight with Nothing More than Electrical Tape"  to one another, and fretting over what’s funny and what’s not, and what’s too rude and what’s not rude enough and somehow getting a book written between us. Along the way we’ve talked about what’s going on in our lives, made each other laugh frequently and possibly cry with frustration on the odd occasion. 

We’ve even had the odd off-peak long distance phone-call where we nervously tried to suss out if one another was one of those unhinged crazies you meet on the internet, who given half an inch,  will turn up at your bedroom window one evening wielding an axe or start sending you carefully constructed and physically uncanny representations of yourself as a voodoo doll through the post. Turns out we were only as unhinged as each other and that’s why we got on so well. If Emma ever sent me a voodoo doll I’m sure it would have been well meant. I’m certainly currently working on a simply darling one for her.

One thing’s for sure it’s not been the easiest way to write a book I’m guessing, but it certainly has been an incredibly interesting one. At first I was convinced that at one point Emma and I would have to at least meet geographically half way and actually clap eyes on one another get this book finished. Maybe we could rent a cheap garret in the Faroe Islands half way across the Atlantic and stay there for a week one of us sat at a laptop typing furiously with fingerless gloves on as the other paced the creaky floor brandishing a half empty wine bottle, dressed in a parka ranting about nipple shields, support pants, colic and the humour therein. After all, isn’t that the kind of thing writers do? It never happened. We each just sat in our respective kitchens thousands of miles from one another and wrote and edited and emailed, and then rewrote and edited and emailed some more without requiring any Faroese hospitality, garrets or otherwise. I still wore fingerless gloves though for that feeling of writerly authenticity...I can’t speak for Emma although I’m guessing, like me, she was in spandex a lot of the time. We both also confess to occasionally brandishing half empty wine bottles.

After all the blood, sweat and emails there came a lovely time when a good while after we had dispatched Cocktails out into the world of publishing and sat expectantly by our letterboxes, we indulged in quite a lot of virtual jumping about hugging one another in cyberspace when we were asked by some nice Australians if they could publish our book. This was indeed an unexpected twist to the already insane geography of this whole project. Let’s get this straight: I live in Aberdeen, Scotland- Emma is English but lives in Baltimore in the United States- and a publisher in Sydney, Australia wants to publish our book? And none of us have ever even been in the same continent as one another at the same time, never mind the same room? Somehow even in the era of an international web community and the whole “global village” thing that still seems completely and utterly mental.

The big question for me is; will Emma and I ever meet one day? I really don’t know. But I know I feel like we already have. In fact, I feel like we’ve been sharing a flat for nearly three years. And yeah, that horrendous mess in the living room, yeah that wasn’t me, that was Emma...

Buy Cocktails at Naptime here.
http://www.finch.com.au/books/cocktails-naptime

(International shipping available)