“What colour are your nipples?” the man on the other end of the phone asked.

Which neatly illustrates something about giving birth that you should have been more prepared for after faithfully watching All Creatures Great and Small every Sunday evening* as a lass.

This series, undoubtedly the epitome of heartwarming Sunday evening TV drama, catalogues the adventures of an old style country vet. And anyone who knows anything about TV dramas featuring country vets will realise that eventually somebody will be up to the elbow in a cow’s bottom assisting delivery of a calf.

So why it came as a surprise that when checking the dilation of your cervix, midwives do not rely merely on peering intently up the beam of a penlight, you are not entirely sure. Although perhaps it was a blessing that you didn’t have much of an idea what was coming when you were asked to hop on the bed and spread your legs.

It did mean that further indignities rather paled into comparison. You are not sure why one of your fonder memories of the birth was lying legs akimbo bleeding like a stuck pig and being stitched up whilst having a gentle post-pushing conversation with B, who was rocking the Star in a somewhat shell shocked manner**. Of course, the fact they had given you back the gas and air equipment might have had something to do with it, but perhaps it was the feeling that only one person was now concerned with that end of you rather than the five (not including B) who had been there five minutes before.

After this getting your breasts out for feeding in front of a ward full of strangers was frankly a doddle, and you barely blinked over the next week at being handled by midwives keen to see that the Star was latching on properly or that your stitches were healing***.

So finding yourself describing your breasts in graphic detail on the phone was something which you only found slightly odd in retrospect. Although in fairness, at the time you were more concentrating on the fact that you had a temperature of 38.5 degrees centigrade and the skin all over your body, particularly your nipples, felt like they had been recently sandpapered, and here was someone who might be able to do something about it before the only access to medical assistance would be you (and the needing to be fed Star) going and sit amongst the Friday night drunks and stabbing victims in A&E.

So now you are on antibiotics, and your temperature is averaging highs of merely 37.5. Now if only the Star would consent to go back to sleeping as happily in the day as he does at night, your life would be complete.

* With cheese on toast.

** They made him watch the head coming out.

*** And really it’s a bit of a mystery as to why this blog entry is not illustrated.

Today the Star smiled at you.

Admittedly this occurred while you were peering intently into his face and smiling at him, and if you peer intently into his face an stick your tongue out he does that too.

Admittedly also B says he reckons he was smiling at him yesterday.

But nevertheless, today the Star smiled at you.

One of the things that puzzled you in the run up to The Birth was the was the way that all the medical professionals you came in contact with took every opportunity they could to go on and on (and on and on and ON) about breastfeeding.

It’s not that you don’t understand the importance of breastfeeding. In fact, obviously, you thought, you were going to breastfeed. What possible reason, in the normal scheme of things, could you have for not doing so? And furthermore, you haven’t met anyone who disagrees yet, despite dire warnings about the attitudes of Grandparents and Mothers in Law.

It seemed, in short, a bit redundant to spend 45 minutes lecturing a room full of women who had clearly already decided to go for it on the five million and one reasons why it rocks. And then to reiterate it on a one to one basis every time they had you backed into a corner of the hospital thereafter, before foisting a positive forest of leaflets on the topic at you as well as deliberately calling you late for appointments so that you spend an extra fifteen minutes in front of the poster screaming BREAST IS BEST.

Although they missed the one which might have swayed it for you if you had been in any way undecided.

Which is that you have finally got a decent pair of tits.

Which since you have been sulking about the fact that the bust size increase they promised you in pregnancy stubbornly failed to materialise - and believe me there was a point there at which you were in the breast measuring programme at Marks and Spencers once a week in the hope that this time you might have progressed to being allowed to wear a maternity bra - is a thing of delight and parading in front of a mirror at least three times a day.

Such a shame that revealing tops also have a tendency to cling to the contours of your rapidly deflating belly.

Anyway, you finally realised what the brainwashing was all about on day five when the midwife turned up at your house and told you that the Star was dehydrated, and the reason was that now your milk proper had arrived, he was not latching on properly. Which you had already got an inkling of as he was feeding for an hour at a time and not much was coming out the other end.*

So for the next twenty four hours you and B spent an inordinate amount of time staring at your nipple area trying to work out if he had grabbed on to enough of it, and listening intently to see if you could hear swallowing.

Really, breasts should come with a little gauge which tells you that the levels of milk are slowly being transferred from one body to another.

Luckily, before you had worked yourself into a complete frenzy, it was the next day and the midwife turned up again to observe your technique and pronounced it good. And since then, the sheer number of nappies you have changed have been quite reassuring.

But you can certainly see that without such intractable, insistent emphasis on the need to breastfeed, there would have been considerable temptation to give up in favour of a method that at least allowed you to be sure the Star was getting sustenance.

*The British obsession with all matters to do with the toilet is sometimes justified.

So the contractions you were displaying proudly for the world here on the 20th, weren’t.

They were, according to the midwives, ’tightenings’ and, officially, did not hurt. 

A comment which, by your third visit to the hospital for monitoring, after you had had a night of napping for five or ten minutes before being catapulted upright by a sharp bit of cramping, was beginning to wear a bit thin.

Of course, falling asleep during this visit while hooked up to the machinery probably didn’t help your case, but as it happens this was because of in a momentary slacking off before the storm.

Because almost as soon as you got home again, you went into labour proper.

Unfortunately, you didn’t realise this as although the pain had indeed changed, settling determindly in your back, you wouldn’t say that it was actually worse than some of the more impressive ‘tightenings’ from before.

So you resigned yourself to watching the clock tick down towards 9pm when they said you could go back, when, you decided sometime around the end of the Formula One qualifying, you were going to request, nay, demand, that they induce you a few hours before their 48 hour deadline, because if this wasn’t PAIN [OW OW OW. OW.OW OW. OWOWOWOWOW. OW. OW. OW] then you really didn’t want to have to sit thought another night before confronting the agony to come.

You did make a few determined bids to be admitted early. You suspect you and the labour ward were talking at cross purposes though, with them assuming that you knew you were in labour and you doggedly thinking you weren’t. You had given up timing your contractions when you found out they weren’t and since you had been told you weren’t in pain, you failed to mention on the phone that actually you were. This was a mistake.

On the other hand, they didn’t actually say that being thoroughly sick is a sign of the baby’s head banging firmly into the cervix and a classic sign of things getting serious (they just said it was nothing to worry about). A bit of a heads up there would have been helpful.

They finally relented around 6pm when you claimed to have a high temperature for the second hour in a row, although you suspect that the real reason why they said to come in was because you had finally reached the stage of mildly incoherent distress that was apparently missing from your demeanour on your hospital visits.

You took the bus.

Well, it didn’t seem worth calling a taxi when you still weren’t in labour. Plus, you can stand up on a bus, and any kind of sitting was fast becoming unbearable.

Mind you, you did somewhat reassess your decision when a young woman persuaded the driver to wait five minutes at one of the stops while she phoned her friends to find out whether it was this stop for the pub or the next one. Thirty seconds longer and you might have actually had to politely request that we all get a move on.

Anyway, you arrived at the hospital in the  middle of a shift change. This meant that they hooked you up to the monitor but delayed the internal examination until they’d handed over. Which leaves you pacing around the monitor machine in a bit of a state, although you are considerably reassured by the fact that there does now seem to be general agreement that you are in labour, and they won’t be sending you home again.

Which emboldened you to ask if a bit of gas and air might be provided.

“I think we’ll wait until your contractions are a bit longer,” is nearly the last thing the departing midwife said.

At which point the new midwives turned up (you got two cos one was a student).

And as you settled back to allow your more intimate parts to be investigated, you launched into a discussion about pain relief, as frankly, all thoughts of trying to last without the heavy duty drugs had flown out of the window with the final words of midwife one.

“See you at 8am,” she said. How you managed not to wail in dismay you are not sure.

However, luckily for your sanity, the cheerful banter of the woman currently at the business end of the proceedings came to a slightly surprised halt at this point.

Because far from being in the very early stages of labour as you had all imagined, it turned out you were actually 9cm dilated at this point.

The speed with which they then hauled you off the bed and shoved the gas and air appliance into your hands was quite gratifying.

And thereafter things became much more pleasant, especially when you discovered that while squatting on the space hopper was almost as agonising as lying on your back, kneeling on the mats with your head on the bed was surprisingly comfortable. Or at least, it was once you had breathed hard on the mouthpiece of relief for a few minutes.

So then you settled in for an hour polite conversation with the midwives punctuated by bursts of frantic sucking and the soundtrack of people chanting ‘Ross -i-ya’ in the background.

Because while you had been convincing the medical team that you were, in fact, in pain, B had been quietly setting about finding a large number of water bottles and a card to activate the TV so you could watch the quarter final of the European Cup as planned.

And very motivating it was too, especially as Russia actually won.

Although possibly a bit too distracting as the cheers had barely died away when B wondered over and took a critical look at you. You were supposed to be pushing by this point. B wasn’t convinced. He was about to recommend that someone forcibly take the gas and air machine away from the deathlike grip you were maintaining so you could better… concentrate on the business of straining, when various doctors trotted into the room and not only acted on this suggestion, but also quickly had you flat on your back again with your feet in stirrups ready to attach a suction cap to the Star and remove him too.

Apparently his heart rate wasn’t recovering as well as it should after each contraction.

Things became very energetic for a while.

One thing was immediately apparent: B was right and you hadn’t been pushing nearly hard enough. The lead doctor took care of this by dint of shouting “PUSH” in your ear at regular intervals, frequently punctuated by “HARDER” and “NO SCREAMING - IT DILUTES THE EFFORT”, although it helped that B was keeping an eye on the monitor and was able to tell you when to start each labour.

It was over very quickly, however. And then there was the Star, aka Ilya Vladimirovich Even-Longer-Russian-Surname-With-A-Particularly-Difficult-Consonant-Cluster-At-The-End, who was and is the most perfect little baby anybody could wish for, even when he does insist on screwing his face up and screaming.

And he was born on the solstice after all, at 22.53 and a weight of 6lbs and 13ozs. Long may he reign.

It turns out that cooking chili last night was a mistake. At least in so much as you were hoping to [ow] hang on to the Star for another couple of days.

Of course, as this was mainly so you could watch the Russia/ Netherlands football match and the Magny Cours Grand Prix in peace, perhaps you have come by your just [ow] deserts.

Anyway, your waters broke at 3am this morning, and after a foray into the labour ward for monitoring, you are now sitting around at home again having contractions every ten minutes or thereabouts and waiting until they are close enough together that the hospital will let you come in again and suck on the gas and air.

At least your ironing has now been done. Amazing [ow] distracting powers, ironing tuns out to have. As does holding a polite conversation about the possibility of getting the lock to the communal front door changed with the landlord from the flat next door, who turned up today to springclean after his latest tenants moved out and found that he didn’t have the knack the rest of you have acquired of jiggling the key just right in order to get out.

[ow]

Likewise the rather late discovery that there may be the faintest of faint possibilities that you are eligible for some kind of maternity benefits after all, which involved you filling in a form, talking to a woman at the jobcentre and [ow] hunting through the hodgepodge of papers you generally stuff into a corner cupboard for your final five payslips.

You still think you will fail to qualify by about two weeks, but it was something to do for an hour or so. It’s all a bit upsetting though. If you hadn’t misread the conditions all those months ago, you could have made sure to get those two weeks in there somewhere in the last nine months, course or no course.

Unfortunately, short of cleaning the fridge, you have rather run out of things to do now. Even the pre Wimbledon tennis tournament has been replaced by Murder She Wrote, which is somehow failing [ow] to hold your attention to the extent that you have only just realised that it’s Columbo where you get to know who the murderer is from the beginning, which would clearly explain why you haven’t got the faintest idea what’s going on here.

So perhaps now is a good time to write about your birthplan.

To be honest, you are well aware of your tolerance for pain - absofuckinglutely zero [OW] - and were quite willing to declare at the beginning of the pregnancy that the mere thought of following the current trend of being out of the reach of the really good drugs in a birthing unit somewhere, naked in a swimming pool in front of hordes of fully clothed midwives, filled you with mildly bemused horror. And as for the idea of a home birth, well, you had visions of your nice clean flat being splattered with blood and other bodily fluids, and frankly this was not something you were prepared to wake up to after undergoing three days of laborious [ow] cramping [ow].

So you were quite set on a hospital birth, especially as you quite like your hospital.

Then, of course, you had your antenatal classes.

Now this is not the first time you have been to antenatal classes. Your first experience with them was back home in S________ when at age 21 your Good Friend found herself with child and in a rare moment of lucidity where men were concerned, decided not to involve the father further.

So there you both were, in the strip lit basement of the local hospital - the sort of place that is almost guaranteed these days to come bottom of the free from MRSA league tables - being talked to about childbirth in a way which has [ow] scarred you so badly you can only remember three things about the experience.

One: the young couple who attended with you. The very young couple. The very [ow] very very young couple. You will swear the boy wasn’t more than 12, although the girl looked somewhat more mature. A large pregnancy bump’ll do that for you of course.

Two: the video of labour they showed you to familiarise you with the process. Despite the fact that they didn’t show you the messy bit at the end, you still found it disturbing. It was the way that the woman who was walking around having her back rubbed by husband looked more and more haggered as the time stamp kept skipping forward another few hours or so [ow].

Three: when they showed you round the actual rooms, there was a woman in the one next door. Screaming, loudly and long [ow ow OW].

This time round, the whole experience was much more pleasant. You are older and more resilient, of course, and so were all the other Mums to be there, which somehow made the atmosphere very cosy, middle class ande reassuring. The video was replaced by demos with a toy baby, a cloth sack and rope representing the placenta and a model of my pelvis, which was much more palatable too. And the tour was completed without sound effects, despite the fact that the midwives claimed that the walls weren’t sound proofed.

In fact, the only thing you found disconcerting was quite how unbothered you were by the class entitled ‘complications’. Because despite the rather large number of them, you got the distinct impression that there were very few of them that could cause modern medicine much of a bother. Although it was extremely worrying to think how very untrue this would have been 200 years ago, and how very real the possibility of dying in childbirth really has been up until the twentieth century.

Anyway, you also discovered that your hospital has its own pools, which turn out to be more like hot tubs, and low key birthing rooms actually installed within the labour ward itself. Rooms which were demonstrably more pleasant than the hospital rooms you get otherwise. You could practically feel every woman there griding her loins [ow], gritting her teeth [ow] and making up her mind to give the natural childbirth route [ow] a whirl so that she got to say with the low level lighting, the bouncy ball, the amusingly shaped chair and the futon style bed.

Including you.

After all, [ow] you will only be a bed wheel away from the heavy duty chemical assistance, not to mention the doctors and the operating theatre.

Let’s see how long that resolution lasts, shall we?

I missed the blog’s second birthday.

Pants.

This does not bode well for the Star.

People can sneer all they like about Russia’s managed democracy, but when a country is faced with the imminent invasion of the supporters of not one but two English football clubs, you have got to admire the government’s ability to declare a blanket ban not only on the consumption of alcohol in public but also on all sales of the demon drink in central Moscow on the day of the all English Champions League Final.

And sure enough the news has just been telling you that with a short time until kick off, the mood of the Chelsea and Manchester fans is ‘pleasant’. 

Can’t imagine where they got the idea from.

One of the side effects of being a teacher is that you often find yourself musing on what makes your students tick.

Well, perhaps ’side effect’ is the wrong phrase. ‘Secret guilty pleasure’ bordering on ’the main reason why you do it’ is probably closer to the mark.

Generally this focuses on what they are like as learners so that you can manipulate them into doing what you want in the classroom, but occasionally, when someone is being particularly dense about learning, you have a lot of free time on your hands or you are simply interested enough, you find yourself going beyond this and attempting to dissect their manners, morals, standards of cleanliness and inexplicable fondness for Barry Manilow. You try to restrain yourself from telling the subject your conclusions though and when you catch yourself idly doing it in real life, you usually have stern words with yourself afterwards.

So submitting yourself for training is always worrying as you are fully aware it is like giving people like you a licence to rootle around in your head. Still, it was disconcerting to discover at your first tutorial of your PGCE course that your University tutor had got you accurately pegged as someone who adores theory and has to be reminded to focus on the practice. It wasn’t the judgement, with which you entirely concur, which took you aback, but the swiftness with which she reached it. You were extremely impressed.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in your final observed lesson of the course which will turn you into a fully fledged Secondary school teacher, your other University tutor also comented on your character.

Well, first he said that you were operating at a conceptual level which few people reach at this stage in their career. You felt extremely smug about this for at least ten minutes, until you remembered that you have ten years teaching experience and infinite amounts of professional development on all of the other trainees on your course.

Anyway, the problem with him trying to guage your personality is that you appear to have reached that stage of pregnancy where all adreneline is being severly repressed and you are sailing serenely though life in a cocoon of squishy marshmallow.

Except for the emotional outbreaks over the colour of the wind, the direction of your breakfast cereal, the smell of your students’ mobiles, and the sound of the book of the person next to you on the bus, of course.

Unfortunately, this urge was coming into direct conflict with the need to get out the whip and chair and beat the unruly teenagers in year nine into submission. You hadn’t, however, realised quite what a profound effect it was having on you until this tutor started talking about your ‘gentle and consensus seeking nature’.

You nearly fell off your chair in shock. When you told former colleagues, friends and your family about this later, they did actually fall off their chairs in shock. Except the husband, who just laughed uncontrollably for a number of minutes, and pointed to the pile of broken plates that littered the kitchen floor after you had suddenly discovered that the teatowl was hanging an inch to the wrong side of left.

Of course, this chap may have been influenced by the way you damply dripped on him before the lesson and requested that you get to finish the teaching practice a week early due to pregnancy induced energy failure. A strategy which was a spectacular success, by the way, and the reason why you are sitting in your pajamas in front of your laptop rather than attempting to convey the significance of the Watergate scandal to a bunch of mystified GCSE students.

It’s been a bit of a fraught pregnancy week all round, to tell the truth. There was the pre-eclampsia scare later on that day, for example, which was not helped by the fact that you made the mistake of getting on a commuter train where none of the young upwardly mobile types in suits got up for you on a twenty minute train journey on your way home.

And then your antenatal classes started, which has brought the whole 20 hours of labour thing into the realms of the real rather than the hypothetical, particularly when they got the toy doll out and started showing you how the contractions will (really very slowly indeed) screw the Star out through your pelvis. You are now attempting to lean forward wherever possible in an attempt to get the Star to engage in the correct birthing position, which is a bit pants when you have just been handed a ticket to lie around in bed all day by the University.

Most irritating is that you have finally succumbed to an actual pregnancy ailment, carpal tunnel syndrome, which has left the fourth and fifth fingers on your right hand virtually unusable. Luckily this does not affect your typing as you have always attempted to go as fast as you can with the hunt and peck method rather than actually learn how to touch type.

Still, not long to go now.

Better get on with the essays you really need to get finished before your waters break, then… 

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.

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.