On privilege.

OK so lots of people have been doing this privilege meme. It’s originally From What Privileges Do You Have?, based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.

 

1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
Engineer.

3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
Geologist.

5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
One. In the whole of history as far as I know. By and large we specialise in being over educated and underpaid. Or teachers, who are both I suppose. Anyway. My cousin is a lawyer. She said going into it that someone in the family should make some decent money. Except she does legal aid type stuff, so isn’t all that well off by lawyer standards.

6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.

7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.
Probably, when you imagine that every room, the landing and the loft had bookshelves.

9. Were read children’s books by a parent.
And frankly, I’m pretty sure my Dad would have continued forever, but at age 12 or so first I and then my brother felt it was all getting a bit undignified. Teenagers, huh?

10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
Ballet, gymnastics, piano, drama and double bass. Only the drama and double bass ones lasted for any real length of time though. Hated ballet and the piano.

Also, do other types of organised after school activity count? Cos I can add brownies/guides and the church youth group to that too. Of the two I infinitely preferred the church youth group. I always felt we should be learning how to light our own fires by friction and tickle trout in a sort of cross between Swallows and Amazons and Ray Mear’s Survival Guides in the Brownies. At least in the church youth group we got to camp in an abandoned church in the middle of nowhere, complete with ancient graveyard.

12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively

White, middle class southern Brits? Yeah. People who have blogs, a passing acquaintance with all things scifi and actual friends who they’ve met on the Internet? Not so much. Teachers? Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha.

13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
No. I only have one now for emergencies.

14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
Fees and such were paid by the taxpayer as per the UK system. My parents paid for my living costs and I worked summers to get spending money.

16. Went to a private high school
No.

17. Went to summer camp
I was going to say ‘No’ in the sense that I understand Summer Camps to be huts by a lake and a variety of Scoutlike outdoor activities, craft projects and campfire singing which lasts for months, but actually I guess I went to Band Camp. Well, Orchestra Camp. Which was definitely not as racy as American Pie makes out.

18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
No.

19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels.

No. We mostly stayed in either a rented cottage next to Windermere or a rented boat on the Norfolk Broads. Rented self catering accommodation, anyway.
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
No. Although in my teenage years a lot of it was.
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them

I used Mum’s car. I miss that Fiat Panda.
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child
It wasn’t very impressive, mind you, and at least one picture was one I did.

23. You and your family lived in a single-family house
Yes.

24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
Yes.

25. You had your own room as a child
Yes.

26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18
No. No one I knew did. This might be more of an age class thing? People didn’t, really, when I was younger.

27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course
Not relevant.

28. Had your own TV in your room in high school
No. See above for phones.

29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college
No. Whatever they are.

30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
No. The first time I flew I was 19 and going to France to see a uni friend who was doing a placement in Versailles. I thought they were going to make me pay for the food.

Mind you, I think this has more to do with my Dad’s travel phobia than anything else.

31. Went on a cruise with your family
No. I don’t think this is a British thing, unless you are over 60.

32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
No.

33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
Yes. Mostly museums. Oddly enough for a historian I find a lot of museums bore me rigid. I think it might be that my Dad has this compulsive thing about stopping to read every label or notice in the place, and I feel both compelled and repelled to do the same.

34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family
Except inasmuchas we didn’t have central heating for a long while and borrowing and turning on the one upstairs heater on was considered a bit of a luxury.

19/34. About right that, I reckon. I am relentlessly Middle Middle Class.

I got B to do this too:

 1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
Engineer.

3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
She studied economics, but didn’t finish. Eventually, she did get accountancy qualifications though and ended up as a head accountant somewhere. Accountancy, to my amusement, is a woman’s profession in Russia.

5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
Teachers, engineers and accountants are what B’s family run to.

6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.

7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.

8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
Books were a bit of a premium and not quite as plentiful in the shops as here. Libraries were though.

9. Were read children’s books by a parent.

10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
Piano and singing. This does make me giggle. B can’t carry a tune and is and rhythm deaf.

11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18.

Disappointing. Most Russians seem to send their kids off to every after school class imaginable. Which I thoroughly approve of. The Star won’t know what’s hit him. Well, we’ve got to keep him from joining agang and knifing someone somehow, eh?

12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively

In Russia. Eastern Europeans are the butt of any number of jokes and sneers on TV in the UK at the moment though, and Russia has only to sneeze before someone on the news claims they are starting the Cold War up again.

13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18.

Not relevant.

14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs

15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
Not relevant. State did. Different system. See also the UK.

16. Went to a private high school
No private schools in the USSR.

17. Went to summer camp
This is quite a Russian thing too, and every factory or organisation organised their own. But he only went once. Hated it and refused to go back. His brothers went often though.

18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18.

Russian kids tend to negotiate their grades after the fact rather than do extra study beforehand. Since the grades are cumulative, mostly this means doing extra coursework to make up for the bits that are letting them down, although B did once help one of his teachers clear out his garage in exchange for a favourable look at his borderline grade.

Personally, I think this system is quite good. Builds negotiating skills and if the point of education is to learn how to do the work well enough to get the grade rather than merely get the grade, then this is better than the one exam one shot system we tend to operate.

19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels.

The only thing my Dad and B’s Dad don’t have in common, I’ve decided, is that B’s Dad loved camping and my Dad hated it.
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18.
The problem of having older brothers is that clothing gets handed down no matter where you come from. Half and half new.

21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
Cars were not so common in the USSR. Plus, you live in Moscow, you have great public transport.

22. There was original art in your house when you were a child.

Although there were more prints.

 23. You and your family lived in a single-family house
Communal flats were a bit of a feature in the Soviet Union. B’s flat started out as a communal flat, but there were rules about how much space each person got and as B’s family grew, they were allotted more of their flat, until it was all theirs. It helped that B’s mother was a bit of an operator and did a few deals along the way to get more space, too.

24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
No private property in the USSR, but they owned the right to live there and when the Soviet Union collapsed were able to privatise the two flats the family had at that point, so we are going to say that for all practical purposes, yes, here.

25. You had your own room as a child.

Shared with a brother. But since brother was considerably older and out a lot…

26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18.

27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course.

Not relevant.

28. Had your own TV in your room in high school.

Again, consumer goods not so common.

29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college.

Not relevant.

30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16.

People in Russia often go long distances in the country by train. And of course, you really were privileged if you were the sort of person who went abroad under the Soviets.

 31. Went on a cruise with your family.

32. Went on more than one cruise with your family.

33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up.

34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.

13/34. If it weren’t such a capitalist, money obsessed quiz… But B says he wouldn’t score that highly on a survey aimed at privileged Soviet people either.

On 9 Rota.

A couple of weeks ago they showed a Russian film about the Russian Afghan war on TV called 9 Rota, or 9th Company.

You actually saw this when it first came out back in 2005 or thereabouts, but settled in to watch it anyway as you remembered it as being quite good, and in any case this time you had the chance to see it with English subtitles.

You distinctly remember that the first time round you sat down to it in some trepidation. This is because you have heard horrendous things about life in the Soviet/ Russian army and were somehow expecting the film to be one long tale of bloody hazings punctuated by the odd suicide. Which just goes to show you how much you had acclimatised back into the British way of doing things after a full year or so back in Blighty. That’s definitely the film a British director would have made.

However, what it actually is, is a war buddy film akin to all those American movies about Vietnam that were so popular in the 80s. Which is entirely appropriate as the Soviet action in Afghanistan was at least as successful as the US involvement in ‘Nam.

So it’s not particularly original as a story. Young recruits, who just happen to run the gamut of character types from an artist  and an oversensitive weakling through new father to a thug and a hooligan, get whipped into shape by an aggressive drill sergeant, before getting sent off to the wilds of Afghanistan where all but one of them get massacred, along with their entire unit, in the last fifteen minutes or so.

You hope that giving the end away is not a spoiler. But frankly they were doomed from the moment they set foot on enemy soil and encountered a set of soldiers who had completed their tour of duty and were on their way home. The vaugue sense of forboding that has been building up throughout the training section is lifted and pretty much everyone, on screen and in front of it, gets carried away by their fierce joy.

And then their plane takes off, promptly gets hit by someone with a granade launcher in the nearby hills and comes down in a ball of flame.

Clearly no one is getting out of here alive.

Anyway, watching it again, a number of things struck you.

There was rather more swearing than you had remembered, for a start.

And you also had to keep reminding yourself that this was something set in the 80s. The late 80s no less. Of course, army life is never luxurious, but to say that the overall quality of life was unrecognisable is probably an understatement, and yet this was a period where you were not only alive but well into your teens.

More than this, however, the sheer geographical range of the characters’ backgrounds which struck you this time round. You have been having the multiculturalism of the UK rather rammed down your throat lately - the fact of it, the desirability (or not) of it, the tensions caused by it and the future of it - and it was with a certain amount of amusement that you recognised that in terms of ethnic diversity, the Soviet Union could certainly give the UK a run for its money.

If this were a British film, you’d tend towards the cynical and suggest that the fact that there were soldiers from all corners of the Slavic empire, as well as representatives from the Caucuses (Chechnya no less) as well as at least one person of obviously Mongolian descent was the traditional nod towards the idea that we are all one big happy family in this nationality.

But Russians on the whole don’t bother with the kind of thinking that suggests we of different backgrounds should all be able to get along, and in any case, the whole thing seemed more an opportunity for the characters to indulge in a bit of energetic and thoroughly un PC racial banter than anything else.

Apart from the whole can of worms which is the use of ‘Chorny’ (’Black’) to describe people of swarthy appearance from the Southern states and whether or not this is supposed to be as insulting as calling someone by the N word, a question you have always rather studiously avoided asking, take the nickname of one of the old lags the raw recruits meet up with once they get in country (or do I mean up country?).

Calling someone from the Ukraine ‘Khokol’ is about as harmless as calling a Welshman ‘Taffy’. It might seem perfectly ok when you are all living in Manchester together as students, but less of a good idea when you have just screamed it across a street while visiting Cardiff.

However, you wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. This name calling is neither a particularly frequent nor particularly notable part of the film, and in fact the whole tone is, you suppose, supposed to evoke the kind of gruff male bonding that women get so very irritated by when it is accompanied by the need to down 13 pints and eat a curry of a Friday evening. The artist’s nickname of ‘Giaconda’ (’Mona Lisa’) isn’t meant to be particularly complimentary either.

More obvious despite the studious avoidance of any real political message in the film, is the complete indifference to the loss of life which is being shown by the Soviet Union towards its own soldiers.

It’s not the shoot out at the end. This is, apparently, based on a real incident, except that instead of the whole company getting slaughtered, only (only) six of the forty odd soldiers actually died, although a good many more were injured ( a lot more Afghans died than that, of course, but this is not a film about the Afghan experience of the conflict).

But the fact that there is a tacit acknowledgement though out the film that there is no winning this war, and yet men will continue to be thrown, virtually unsupported and distinctly underequiped and undertrained, at the problem indefinitely, is frankly absolutely typical of the Soviet and now Russia’s attitude towards its own people.

You have occasionally found yourself slightly impatient with the way that everybody in the US and the UK seems so surprised, nay outraged, that soldiers tend to get a bit killed when engaging in war. It is, of course, an example of the insistence that it’s the individual that counts above everything, and that is something that you often find so obnoxious in this society.

Yet without that constant pressure, would the casualty rate not be even higher? At the moment, the US death count in Iraq is about 4,000. Which if you consider that they have been there for about half the time the Soviets spent in Afghanistan, is about half of half of the total deaths in Afghanistan (15,000). It is a good thing that the standard of equipment and support given to troops is a matter of debate and investigation. It is a good thing that there is some sense that people should not be used as cannon fodder.

What you find absolutely unsupportable is the acceptance of the routine disposal of Soviet/ Russian citizens in acts of mass carnage which this film reflects.  It’s not the first war film to deal with this issue. It’s not the preserve of Soviet or Russian warfare. But you could really have done with it little less fatality and a little more outrage on this point.

Although your dismay may have also been brought about by the thought that you are about to give birth to someone who in 18 years will be eligible for conscription into the Russian army.

On good citizenship.

Yesterday, you went to the airport to see off Mother In Law after her epic three month visit.

So there you are, sitting in the cafe having a last cup of tea before sending her off to brave the security gauntlet, when you notice that there’s a number of cabin crew types drinking coffee there too.

You were idly pondering over this - you had rather assumed that one of the perks of being cabin crew was that you don’t have to mix with the rumpled masses of the great unwashed at an airport - when one of them gets up and wonders off leaving his luggage behind.

And then doesn’t come back.

So then you sit there for about five minutes, looking around and hoping that someone else has noticed that there are now two unattended suitcases lurking in the middle of Heathrow.

But apparently, the answer is no and you realise that whilst ordinarily you would just sit there feeling the same sort of thrill you get before doing something mildly dangerous like getting on a rusty, rickety roller coaster in Blackpool, the presence of the Star means that you feel somehow obliged to be excruiciatingly unBritish and not mind your own business.

At which point a policeman hoves into view. Fully bullet proof jacketed and complete with gun, which, as you haven’t been to an airport for a while, is a bit disconcerting.

Unfortunately, some other people have now sat down next to the bags, and so the policeman goes straight past them. So you are actually forced to (unobtrusively) flag him down and in what you are fondly hoping was a very unhysterical manner, mention that you don’t think those bags belong to that couple, and they were just sitting there before they came.

The policeman was monumentally casual. You were most impressed by his saunter as he made his way over to the bags. You got ready to duck and cover or make an orderly sprint for the exit, anticipating sirens, flashing lights and the closure of Terminal Two for six and a half hours.

Frankly, it was all a bit of a let down when, as he was fingering the luggage labels, two gentlemen hurtled over from the other side of the cafe to explain that the bags belonged to them, but they couldn’t be bothered to wheel the trolley through the tables to the nice window seat they were occupying.

And you are still reeling from the shock of having been a good citizen for approximately the first time in your life. You must be getting old. At this rate you’ll be writing to the council to complain about cracks in the pavement before the year is out.

On shocks and docs.

The doctor kept you waiting for 40 minutes this morning simply because, you discovered once you had actually made it into her office, she likes to chat.

This, however, is not important. What is important is that in between the five anecdotes about her own pregnancy which she managed to showhorn into the measuring and prodding that goes on in these sessions, she told you that in the next four weeks the Star is going to double in size.

Oh.

My.

God.

Is all you have to say about that.

On the unbearable being.

You have to confess that you find the Star’s complete insistence on you eating healthily somewhat obnoxious.

There is something perverse, in you opinion, about the amount of fruit and veg he thinks is the minimum necessary for your combined survival.

This has been particularly hard to bear given that it is winter. You are heartily sick of oranges, apples and bananas.

All you can say is, he doesn’t get it from your side of the family.

Although you suppose that you should be thankful that it won’t come as a surprise when he hits his teenage years and will only wear organically spun hemp and eat free trade brown rice which has been humanely boiled in ungenetically engineered spring water. And such.

And will run marathons. Since it seems that the Star also objects to your habitual sloth.

There you are, having a much deserved lie in on the first day of the Easter holidays that, owing to the unaccustomed early arrival of the chocolate egg season, aren’t.

And the Star decides that today is the day for giving you a damn good kicking.

Luckily B got to share in this delightful experience for once. Because, and I’m afraid this is going to be something of a cute pregnancy moment so those of a delicate disposition should look away now, as you were spooning at the time, the Star was managing to hammer so energetically on Papa-to-be’s kidneys that Papa woke up.

Indignant.

Which is precisely how you feel when eating the smallest slither of cake makes you feel distinctly ill for the rest of the day.

On the state of the Zeppelin.

Of course, ‘rocketing out of your chair shouting obscenities at the TV’ has been a bit hard of late given that you developed horrendous backache last week.

‘Flopping over onto your side and using all available furniture and husbands to pull yourself up while whimpering before waddling slowly off like a duck’ would definitely have been more accurate.

This undoubtedly serves you right for having felt so splendid over the last few months. But you are into the last trimester now and have started warily eyeing the hemorrhoid counter in Boots in anticipation, staring at the bits of your stomach you can still see in case stretch marks appear and checking your legs for pulsating veins.

The whole question of pain (relief) during birth is becoming worryingly concrete about now too.

Mind you, the splendidly ergonomic chairs in the staffroom of your latest school seem to have done the backache wonders for now, so perhaps you shouldn’t get unduly pessimistic just yet.

On misleading advertising

Now you wouldn’t want to give anyone the impression that you are anti advertising.

Far from it, in fact. You find ads endlessly fascinating.

You take a secret delight in an industry that is blatantly all about manipulation. So much more honest than the pretence of making objective news reports.

It’s quite soothing just to be able to relax and let your brain get washed without constantly having to count how many pejorative adjectives the anchor has used about Vladimir Vladimirovitch or analysing the effect of having the Russia-based correspondent, wearily urging some sort of perspective, interviewed rather than introduced as a reporter, placing him on the same ‘this is just one side of the story’ footing as Berezovsky’s mouthpiece.

Because you are also not under any illusions about whether or not it works. The existential crisis you felt when first shopping in Russia for washing powder which was brought about by not finding any of the familiar brand names certainly would have put paid to that.

If you hadn’t, years before, found yourself in McDonald’s ordering some special new type of chicken burger after being caught at a weak moment in front of the TV on a Saturday morning with a hangover by a particularly seductive shot of sizzling meat and lettuce in a sesame seed bun, of course.

It’s such a pleasingly functional art form as well. The thing that occasionally bothers you about the more self indulgently incomprehensible items of Modern Art is that you find it difficult to work out what’s it’s for. Especially if it seems to require very little actual skill to produce.

Of course, art generally is clearly for historians. Likewise, literature. But you find it hard to decide what a historian will gather from Hirst’s cows pickled in formaldehyde or Emin’s bloody underwear other than the fact that clearly some people in the late 20th Century had too much time on their hands.

Advertising is obviously for something. Even if it is making money, this, somehow, makes it OK.

And not without its own sociological interests either.

You were quite pleased with the latest series of BT ads at first. They represent the latest attempt at one of those advertising soap operas, with a set cast of characters all singing the praises of various aspects of the product whilst unfolding some kind of storyline.

You were amused that in contrast with Nescafe’s very 80s inspired tale of two urban sophisticates flirting in their chrome laden apartments, and the 70s homely Bistro family, with its housewife mother, plump children, pine kitchen and dog, this set of skits is all about the difficulties of a man taking on a woman who has two children and an annoying ex husband. Very appropriate, you though, particularly as the man is doing a very good impression of a chap out of a Nick Hornby novel.

However, all enjoyment of this particular series has been destroyed by the latest episode, which is on distressingly heavy rotation at the moment.

It’s supposed to be telling us all about the amazing facility BT Internet services offers to back up all the data stored on your computer, and the way we hammer the message home is by having the Woman greet her Bloke all distressed one evening with the horrifying news that she has deleted an important folder on her computer. The implication is that this is the only place where the important things inside the important folder exist.

The thing is, this important folder contains all the photos of her children ‘from when they were babies’.

What sends you rocketing out of your chair screaming obscenities at the TV and totally unable to appreciate the hysterically funny little exchange that then takes place when the Bloke reassures Woman that it’s OK, they can make another one, and the Woman thinks Bloke means a baby, is that even you can see that the eldest child is into his teens.

And you may be a bit backwards when it comes to technological innovations, but you very much doubt that anybody much had a digital camera in, what, 1996, and are certain that only the nerdiest of techno nerds has transferred all their paper photos and film onto the computer and destroyed all the paper negatives since then.

On being nearly new.

You went to an NCT sale today. Elbows at dawn to hold off all the other mums or mums-to-be as you all dive simultaneously for that Natty Designer Babysock sort of thing.

You went with Best Friend, as it occurred to you that having a bone fide mother in tow might help you start to navigate your way through the frightening wilderness of Things You Do Not Know About Having A Baby. In this case, specifically, clothes.

What, for example is the difference between a bodysuit, a babygrow and a growbag, how many pairs of cutely logoed vests do you need and exactly what is this actually for?

You set off this morning blithely declaring that you weren’t actually going to buy anything, this was merely a reconnaissance mission.

B refrained from commenting and stuffed a handful of notes into you purse.

You now have two very large plastic bags full of Darling Little Outfits.

Some of them don’t have a hint of blue on them.

On more comparative linguistics.

Incidentally, you did find something new out in your first trimester, and that is that it is impossible to sing while pregnant.

Unfortunately, you discovered this by collapsing in the middle of the winter concert of your choir.

Interesting programme. You have now added two new singing languages to your repertoire: French and Russian.

French, the conductor spent a savage five minutes saying, is the Worst Language for Singing Ever. If you remember correctly, which you probably don’t, it has no proper consonants to punctuate the words and sounds like a bunch of muddy nasal vowels run together. It is possible, he claims, to actually fall asleep from boredom in the middle of what should be the most fantastic piece of music by someone like Debussy.

Certainly you find it incredibly difficult to sing in French. This is because you have never had much of a grasp on the French accent. You may have learned French for five years at school, but the best you have ever managed in that language is ‘I would like a kilo of tomatoes, please’ uttered in the broadest of dodgy sub London tones.

So it’s quite a good thing that presumably the audience were not picking much up from the mass nose singing in that piece.

The Russian pieces, on the other hand, were easy, despite the fact that you had no idea of what you were actually saying. Perhaps because a lot of it was in Church Slavonic, but probably because your Russian has always been much more use in asking people to pass you another cup of tea than capable of sophisticated abstract discussions.

Still, it was nice to know that the language is not familiar enough for you to do the consonant clusters, which really do look jaw cracking in Latin script, without thinking and for the next syllable to be thoroughly unsurprising.

You also found the conductor’s brief masterclass on how to speak Russian quite accurate. ‘Pretend you are swallowing a watermelon’, was the advice he gave. This just confirms what you have maintained for a while: English vowels are formed at the front of the mouth, and Russian at the back, practically in the throat.

There really isn’t much to beat some of the splendidly dark notes that this can produce.

Although you did find the conductor speaking Russian in order to demonstrate some of the strings of Russian sounds quite amusing. As a result of not having much idea of what he is saying, all the phrasing goes and it sounds much more like a record being dragged around backwards than actual Russian. Luckily, he is a fiend for getting it right when singing.

So B, who had been clutching his sides in glee at the thought of quite what middle class Britishness was going to do to Rachmaninoff and the boys, was quite surprised to find that not only could he understand us in the concert, but that we actually sounded quite Russian. Once he had looked that the words in the programme, that is.

Perhaps there was hope for the French piece after all.

You rounded off the evening with what is, judging by the look of ecstatic contemplation that came over the conductor’s face every time he mentioned it, a real singers’ piece of music.

Durufle’s Requiem. Wisely written, despite the composer’s Gallic background, in Latin.

Here it is, although you really don’t think that the Cyberbass keyboards are going to do justice to the modern Gregorian chant thing Durufle has going on.

Anyway, the fainting.

Well, to be honest, after you had gone through three rehearsals without being able to stand for the whole thing, having to sit down in the middle of the cpncert in order to prevent yourself falling off the stage didn’t come as a big surprise.

It was, however, a phenomenon that was beginning to quite worry you, until a woman you had noticed sinking gracefully into her seat at about the same time as you in both the dress and the concert waved away concerned enquiries by telling everyone she was pregnant. You nearly kissed her. It apparently being a pregnancy thing rather than a Solnushka and pregnancy thing and all.

So one of the five million and two things They don’t tell you about pregnancy is: as an amateur, you can’t sing in a choir after about ten weeks.

On фабрика звозд.

This time you spent the first twelve weeks ignoring the situation, beyond rather bad temperdly giving up the things you are supposed to be giving up and doggedly taking the pills you were supposed to be taking. There wasn’t even the distraction of the novelty of new sensations.

As a result you craved certain types of cheese almost solidly, the only respite being when you felt sick. Luckily, this was quite a lot of the time.

The first scan, of course, was a relief. One head, two arms and legs, complete with the correct number of hands and feet, and, praise be, a heartbeat.

But then your system went quiet. There was no dragging tiredness or nausea anymore to let you know something was going on, just a sudden increase in the amount of milk you were buying, an inexplicable hatred for peanuts, and a cautiously expanding waistline.

And it was starting to worry you. Not the fear for what might be wrong, but the fact that trying not to get too excited for so long so as not to let the fear take over had resulted in you having no particular interest in the proceedings.

Although the second scan was quite a blast. You can see bones, even. Mind you, you are not sure that seeing a small skull grinning back at you was quite the first treasured memory of you baby’s face you really wanted. It was nice to know, though, that the club foot which your Mother had kindly reminded you runs in the family has been avoided this time round.

But then it changed. Then it started kicking. Which, I am here to tell you, is nothing whatsoever like fluttering.

There was this programme you and B once watched in which a character was describing how he was freaked out by his partner’s pregnancy. He kept imagining, he said, that scene from alien where the creature fought itself, quite bloodily, out of its host’s stomach. He had a graphic little mime to accompany the description and everything. You had both always found this quite amusing, but now you suspect that the scene was written by a pregnant woman.

The thing about the kicking is that it isn’t just kicking. There is, of course, something very odd about seeing your stomach jump for reasons which are largely beyond your control. But it’s the wriggling, a sensation that has finally convinced you there is a small independent being crawling around in there that you find particularly disconcerting. And delightful.

You can only hope it doesn’t decide to eat its way out.

So anyway. There it is. You are pregnant. 22 weeks. It’s a boy. Due the end of June.