Posted by admin at March 15th, 2007

The weather here in London at the moment is seriously glorious - waking up in the morning is an honest-to-goodness enthusiastic experience, even with the leg cramps, the urgent need to pee and the Sahara-like thirst which glues my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Yep, it’s spring - everything’s sprouting, blooming and the potential in the air is just giddy-making. And I’m part of this. I’m having a child. Nothing like a bit of elemental biology to get you in touch with the world at large. I’ve just started to feel tiny movements - admittedly it feels rather like the child is blowing minute bubbles at my abdominal wall but I know, thanks mainly to the endless books I’ve read along with some basic intuition, that each bubble is the swim of a little foot or the wave of a little hand and it’s just the most amazing feeling in the world. This morning I danced around the kitchen to Joni Mitchell and there were those bubbles - apparently our child likes Chelsea Morning and really, who can blame it when you’ve got the french windows open, the sun shining in and your mother singing really badly out of tune? So this child, our child, is the most precious thing in the world - already I feel this overwhelming love everytime I rub my belly, everytime I think of the tiny life wriggling around in its own personal water-pod. And I’ve already started having dreams for our child. All the places they will go, all the brilliant things they will do, all the smiles they’ll give and it’s exciting - more exciting than anything. Really. This is the best thing I have ever done.

And then there are the fears, the worries  - the dark side. I look around at the world that I’m going to be bringing this child into and I realise that things aren’t going so well. It’s all a bit, well, shattered - all those great ideas that someone once had seem to have become corrupt, warped and everything seems to be headed in this very wrong direction. Let’s start with our government - the death-eaters I now call them (apologies to JK Rowling but I think she’ll get where I’m coming from). It seems to me, sitting here on my hormonal, mother-to-be perch, that our government, along with the governments of pretty much everywhere else, are all about death. I mean really, those pro-lifers should leave those poor women at the abortion clinics alone and turn their attention to the real killers.

Let’s take the whole Trident Missile System debacle - our government are gearing up to spend around £20billion on a defence system that nobody wants and we don’t actually need. Defence system. Interesting terminology. Defence against what exactly? These are weapons of mass destruction and, um, excuse me, didn’t we just go to war over something like that? Oh that’s right - those ones didn’t actually exist. By the way, it’s worth mentioning that this nuclear defence system is going to be put in Scotland - a country that may well become independent from England at some point soon. Brilliant.

Meanwhile, the NHS - yep, that’s the institution that is supposedly about life (the clue is the ‘health’ bit of the name) - is currently running at a £1.179 billion deficit. There is money literally leaking away through the unclean floorboards of each and every hospital and no one seems to have any answers as to why.

It seems to me that our government are far more interested in destruction than construction. It’s all very well having a top-of-the-range, better-than-anything-George has got, better-than-the-yellow-Tonka-truck-I-had-when-I-was-5, defence system but if we carry on like this we’re actually not going to have anybody to defend. They’ll all have died in childbirth or from MRSA or from some new fabulous disease that nobody saw coming because our defence system was looking the other way at the time.