And here beginneth the lesson...

Talking of boycotts, just if you were in any doubt that Nestlé was still up to its old tricks, read this rather scary Guardian article about the situation in Bangladesh.

I really don't expect every one to follow my own example by being militant about refusing to buy Nestlé products (I check the brand of coffee in restaurants and won't even let hairdressers use L'Oreal shampoo on my hair) but I would urge you, when faced with a choice of buying a Nestlé product or something manufactured by someone else, please at least just consider buying the latter option? If you're not sure what products are Nestlé you can find a list here. Some of them you might find surprising - did you know Buitoni pasta and Herta hotdogs were Nestlé? San Pellegrino water? Felix cat food? They won't necessarily say Nestlé on the packaging.

If you need further convincing, it was this picture that really brought the message home to me when I first heard about the boycott a few years ago.

*And plenty of other formula-milk manufacturers of course, but Nestlé are the biggest manufacturer world-wide and still the most prolific flouter of the WHA International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes

Mars comes to its senses

Phew! One less company I have to boycott. Funnily enough, I dreamt last night that Mars had made this announcement so imagine my surprise this morning...

My flat - a tribute

It may not look much from the outside, but I really really love my flat. It felt like home from the moment the estate agent walked me through the door. The buying process was a struggle - moving house and getting divorced simultaneously cannot be recommended - but living here has been instrumental in helping me recover from the divorce. The view alone makes me smile every single day and having a boat on the lake gives me the chance to experience the wildlife - and the methane-producing algae - close up.

My neighbours are fab: Ali opposite who sweeps me off my feet at Salsa every week and his flatmate Matt who's terribly polite, despite being the quietest man in history, who hasn't said more than 5 words since I've lived here (so the complete opposite of Ali);Tom next door who still holds out hope of catching one of the lake's wily carp (no chance mate!); Caroline & Spencer below who are getting married in a typical HUGE Irish wedding (don't think Spencer knows what he's letting himself in for); Rachel who used to rent my flat before buying the flat below Ali, who lives with her cats Richard & Presley and is having a terrible year; the Japanese (Chinese? Oh, that's terrible that I'm not sure) woman whose name I don't know with the gorgeously cute children who live upstairs; the Polish couple, with Kristian the baby, who live above me and are always so friendly but hate us having barbecues; Carey who lives on the top floor and has become Caroline's drinking buddy after she happened upon us all sat in my rather large paddling pool during one our regular impromptu barbecues last summer.

I've loved living by myself - well, more recently with the cats of course - and having my own space. It didn't need any work when I moved in because Belinda & Hilton, who I bought the flat from, had done such a good job. It's open plan and spacious: they'd knocked out a couple of doorways and, having seen some of the other flats which still have the original layout, I think it was exactly the right thing to do. Buying little bargains for it, such as my dining table and chairs has been such fun - eBay is king - and I'm grateful for all the donations I received from my friends, such as my sofa from Zoe & Phillip, leather armchairs (which are now covered in claw marks goddamn it) and my bed, both from Linda & Karl. I've loved building flat pack furniture - my bed, wardrobe, two chests of drawers and a shelf unit to date - and have even (shock! horror!) kind of enjoyed keeping it clean.

So now the great 'pack up' begins. My friends Debbie & Ian move in here the weekend after next while I move to my dad & step-mother's in order to save some money for my trip. I know it's for all the right reasons, but I'm going to miss the flat soooo much. At least it's D & I who are moving in, so I know it'll be well looked after and I can still visit. They're going to be looking after the cats too, who I'm also going to miss big time. I'm trying to have as many snuggles with them now as I can to carry me through. sigh.

Game on

Well, there's no getting out of it now. Got my visa [check], booked my flight [check], cacking my pants [check].

5th September 2007, 1500 hours: Vancouver here I come.

Erm....was I missing something here?

Serbia? Our, admittedly small, Eurovision party put that way down towards the bottom of the list in all catagories: dull song, uncharismatic androgynous singer and a frankly weird performance. Even the FRENCH entry was better than that. THE FRENCH I tells ya. So so so glad to see the UK did not vote for it at all, at least we have good taste. The Greek entry (Yassou Maria) was clearly the best song and was robbed of its rightful victory. Go on, give it a little listen, you know you want to. I did like one of the comments on the Radio 2 message board (yes, I am that sad):

All the UK needs next year then is a little fat Billy Bunter-a-like to belt out a funeral march and it's in the bag.

It was the Oatlands Village Fayre yesterday, which appeared to have upped the ante since I last went, by having a stunt show, culminating in a man setting himself on fire and jumping off a 100ft high tower onto a bouncy castle, which exploded. They also had a stall where, for £2.50, you could drizzle paint onto a piece of card and then spin it, which made it look way cool. I loved it so much I now have a complete series:

So how'd we do?

A rather excellent report from The Daily Show highlighting the self-congratulatory and demonising tendencies of the American media in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings:


Oh and if you can still hear Will Ferrell starting up every time you visit my blog, I'm sorry. He's nearly off the bottom of the page now so it won't go on for much longer. Scoot down there and shut him up for me, will ya?

Bang to rights?

Just watched the Panorama programme 'Midwives Undercover', which aimed to highlight the problems in Britain's maternity units using secret filming by a journalist working as a volunteer. It was alarming stuff, but one of the problems with having a lay person looking for problem areas is that, unless you know what you're looking for, you run the risk of making an issue out of something that really isn't that big a deal and, as a result, missing the really important things.

Certainly there was a big fuss made over the fact that the journalist was asked to hold a baby's heart monitor transducer in place for a 20 minute period "without having any training at all". Now, it is certainly the case that interpreting a CTG (cardiotocograph) trace takes training and if mistakes are made, they have the potential to be catastrophic. BUT holding the transducer in place is a job more usually done by an elasticated strap. Only if the baby is in an awkward position, as presumably was the case here, do you have to angle it a bit by hand. The woman was not in labour, so it was highly unlikely that the trace would show anything requiring immediate action and the midwives were popping in to look at the trace every 10 mins or so, as they would normally have done. So is it really a major story that the volunteer was acting as an glorified bit of elastane? To my mind, it's far more appropriate that the volunteer was doing this, than the midwife who had plenty of better things to be getting on with.

The other thing that crops up time and time again, whenever anything is reported about maternity services, is the inevitable 'my baby died/had brain damage because of what they did' story. I apologise if that comes across as heartless, it's not intended to be. The fact is however that babies do die, they do get brain damaged, and whilst we should never become complacent about it, and we should of course do everything we can to prevent it, we will never be able to save every baby. I cannot comment on the two cases discussed on tonight's programme, for the obvious reason that I wasn't there and I don't have any of the details, but warning bells always ring for me when phrases such as "So & so was already having problems before they arrived on the ward" are heard. Many - if not most - cases of brain damage are due to antenatal insults, meaning that the care in labour does not directly contribute to the outcome, the damage has already been done before you get there without anyone being able to do anything about it. Proving it one way or another is often impossible though and often results in hospitals offering (substantial) out-of-court settlements to parents. Whilst I have a lot of sympathy for parents who are naturally devastated and seek to apportion blame in someone's quarter, but I also have a lot of sympathy for those involved in the care, who often did their best, with an outcome that was inevitable.

It is definitely beyond question that there is a shortage of midwives in most units though and, yes, this can contribute to the kind of problems detailed above. Much much more often, however, it contributes instead to women - or whole families - having a thoroughly miserable and rather crap experience. This may be the poor cousin of the catastrophic events we love to hear about, but if you ask me, it's a much bigger problem. Women who've had crap care are more likely to have had unnecessary interventions (expensive to the NHS, detrimental to women's bodies), develop postnatal depression, be overly anxious about subsequent pregnancies which results in more unnecessary interventions - if they go on to have any more children that is. I often wonder how many women never go on to have the families they would have wanted because they were badly treated the first time; I have a friend who is finally having her second baby now, 14 years after her first, because it's taken her this long to pick up the courage after having such a horrible time with her first.

Ah well. It's only a job, eh?