Morning:
8°c
HAH! Take that, hippies!" Such will have been the reaction of many to the news of a Swedish study seeming to refute the claims of "natural childbirth" advocates that breathing alone can control pain.
It would have been my reaction, too, had it not come two days before my own antenatal classes. There I was yesterday, watching my beloved bellow like a bullcalf and seeing rubber dolls pushed into a plastic pelvis and for why?
The Swedes compared two groups of expectant mothers - one who were taught breathing exercises, the other not. More than half the latter went for epidurals.
But more than half the former did, too. "Breathe breathe visualise breathe breathe YOWCH! OK, not joking this time: give me the drugs," is my idiomatic translation from the Swedish.
This isn't to be ignored. But what does it tell you, exactly? As the National Childbirth Trust's Belinda Phipps pointed out, take-up of epidurals on the day seems like a slightly funny metric by which to assess the value of antenatal education.
Learning to do breathing exercises doesn't disqualify you from changing your mind afterwards, and in the UK the more important comparison may be some antenatal education versus none at all.
In the round, these classes are less about pain relief than about focusing the mind on preparing to be flattened by a pantechnicon with "love" inscribed on one headlamp and "fear" on another.
When my girlfriend mentioned NCT to her midwife, though, she was reproached: why do that, rather than the hospital's own course?
Actually, she wasn't told about the hospital's own course, though I maintain she should have said: "But we want to make nice middle-class friends", just to test the reaction.
You can see why some in the NHS might not see it as their favourite charity.
Looked at in one way, National Childbirth Trust classes will give those who can afford them an informed sense of their options and entitlements under the law: making first-time mothers feel more in control and less like cogs in a scary medical machine.
Looked at from another point of view, of course, they could be releasing into an already hard-pressed system a raft of half-educated I-know-my-rights-ers waving birth plans, tying up care staff and overruling their midwives.
Having just done two days with a really informed and helpful instructor - who didn't do a bit of propagandising - I take the former view; though you don't need to scour chatrooms long to find resentful victims of natural-birth bossy-boots.
So I don't know whether breathing helps. I don't know whether epidurals are the devil's work. We shall see. But from the worm's eye view I can confirm that, as per Miz Phipps, "some" is better than none.
I looked down at my flip-flops on the way home in yesterday's sunshine and they said: "No Fear" on the straps.
That's the name of the flip-flop company, apparently, but I took it as a good omen.
I indulge my invisible man
To the Royal Institution, to indulge my science-envy (the sort of condition for which Germans would have a word, if they needed one) at a talk by the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku.
Dr Kaku, author of Physics of the Impossible, looks at a number of science-fictional dreams and ranks them in categories of impossibility: class one impossibilities are crackable within decades or centuries; class twos may be millennia off; but only class threes are, actually, impossible.
So, for instance, invisibility shields are, he says, a technology that's only decades away and whose principles have already been established. Time travel violates none of the laws of physics but may be further off.
But he's an optimist. “Stephen Hawking says time travel must be impossible. He asks: where are the tourists from the future?” Dr Kaku said: “To which I answer: they're invisible.”
Great act, shame about the name
On the one hand, how uplifting that a dance troupe won what we have learned to call BGT: they will soon be forgotten, and think of all the parties their victory poops! Record labels, Boylista partisans, Barack Obama and Pebbles the cat alike.
On the other, what a shame that they have as their name the emptiest of New Labour cant-words. “Diversity”. Yech. Sweary Angel Miss Boyle stood for “quiddity”, and she can be proud of that.
Spare us the hunting wail, Mr Ferry
Foxy pro-hunting agitator Otis Ferry, who spent four months in prison awaiting trial on suspicion of perverting the course of justice, complains that he has been persecuted for his beliefs.
“The police and Crown Prosecution Service were baying to screw me over as hard as they could.
The Gloucestershire constabulary are notorious celebrity-hunters,” he said in an interview, adding eccentrically: “Not that I consider myself a celebrity'. I hate the word.”
The “socialist government”, too, was against him: “I am the epitome of everything they detest.” Certainly, being denied bail four times in a row seems a rough deal.
But seeing himself as a prisoner of conscience is babyish. Many share his beliefs, proclaim them from the rooftops, and live in peace with the police.
Only the ones caught, for example, approaching the then Prime Minister's constituency home uninvited, mounting loutish invasions of Parliament and wiping videotapes that don't belong to them (Mr Ferry grabbed a hunt sab's camera during a bit of argy bargy and wiped the tape before handing it back) tend to find themselves remanded for trial.
