Another Really Good Sandwich

Currently, I do not feel the urge to blog. My life is a nonstop whirl of work, because uni hate me and set the deadline for my dissertation proposal/sample chapter for the 9th January AND I HAVE TO POST THE FUCKING THING IN THE ACTUAL POST, so realistically, I need to finish it and post it by the 5th at the latest. I am, however, well proud of what I've got planned. Soph: Crime and Sexuality Historian at your service. I have a four month research break from January-May and then seven months of write up...and then, fuck knows. A job? Hold tight, NHS, I'm coming back to administrate you!

As well as work, I am trapped by the twin rock of grief and anxiety. Grief for my mum, whose loss lingers in every lit up window, in every Christmas card, in every present wrapped. Grief in every present I would have bought her. Grief in everything I want to phone and ask her ("Mum, are you sure this bloody pudding needs three hours steaming??"). Grief in everything I want to share with her, every nativity and every funny thing Alex (experiencing his third Christmas, but his first as a properly aware person) comes out with. 

And anxiety, because having a stupid fucking anxiety disorder which has MOSTLY gone away since The Worst Thing That Could Happen Happened And I Survived, rears its hideous and unwanted head at Christmas. "What if you all DIE ON CHRISTMAS EVE?" it whispers into my ear. "DID YOU LEAVE THE OVEN ON? WILL THE HOUSE BURN DOWN? I BET IT WILL". "YOU'LL VOMIT ALL OVER YOURSELF AND THE CHRISTMAS DINNER AND THE CHILDREN WILL HOWL AND YOU WILL REMEMBER THIS AS THE CHRISTMAS OF PUKE". I know it's irrational. It doesn't make it any easier to bear. My festive anxiety is not a new thing. As a seven(ish) year old, my parents had to take me to the emergency doctors on Christmas Eve because I was in such excruciating pain. It was just excitement. I used to puke every single Christmas Eve. The last time was when I was about 22. It's quite irrational. Thankfully, my endometriosis painkiller is also an anxiolytic, so at a push, I can eat them until I fall into a passive coma (*don't try this at home, kids*).

But this is all by the by. I came to give you a brilliant recipe for your leftover turkey, because I have always been revolted by the very fucking idea of cold turkey with a plate of bubble and squeak (sorry Dad). On Boxing Day, we don't have the older two boys, so I tend to breakfast on prosecco and REALLY EXPENSIVE bacon sandwiches like a luxuriant slattern. But you can't actually live on prosecco and bacon (and cheese) for the entire festive period (I KNOW, SO UNFAIR). 

This is an adapted form of the Vietnamese sandwich, Banh Mi, which I have bastardised from a recipe by Niki Segnit in the fabulous The Flavour Thesaurus. If you're carnivorous, you can probably assemble this sandwich from what you have on hand. And it is WORTH getting rice wine vinegar in just to make it, believe me. It needs a little work in advance, but not like Christmas dinner levels, and it's bright and refreshing in a sea of fat and carbs and fat. 

Sorry, no veggie/vegan alternative, but the pickled veg is bloody lovely in most things or indeed, on its own. 

You Will Need For About Four Sandwiches:

For The Pickle

A peeled carrot

An unpeeled cucumber

Rice wine vinegar

Salt

Sugar

For Assembly

Pâté - chicken liver for preference, but it's Christmas so whatever you've got. Nothing too spicy or herby though. 

Mayonnaise - Helmans is fine

Fish sauce (aka nam pla)

Soy sauce

Leftover turkey shredded into strips

Four short baguettes cut not-quite-in-half lengthways

Fresh coriander, but it's not essential

This is a recipe of two halves, so you need to plan it a tiny bit. 

First, pickle your veg, Cut your cucumber and carrot into matchstick pieces. I am crap at cutting them this fine, but you want them fairly thin because nobody wants to bite down on a fucking enormous piece of carrot in their sandwich. Take the seeds out of the cucumber as you chop it up, or the resulting pickle will be a wet seedy mess. Once they are cut, cover them in salt and leave them for ten to twenty minutes. I do this with them on a piece of kitchen roll in a colander in the sink, because the salt draws the moisture out and then it drains straight out into the plughole rather than sitting about, sludgily. When you think they've had long enough, rinse them, dry them and then put them in a bowl. Mix about four tablespoons of rice wine vinegar with a tablespoon of sugar and then pour if over the veg. Leave it in the fridge to marinate until you want it. I tend to do this in the morning if I'm eating in the evening but you can really do it any time in the 24 hours before you want to eat. This sounds a faff. It is not. 

And so to assembly. Drain the veg. Mix some mayonnaise with a dash of fish sauce and a dash of soy sauce - you don't want to make the mayo too runny. Then spread one cut side of the baguette with mayo. Spread the other side with pâté. Warm it through in the oven. Then stuff the baguette with drained veg and shredded turkey. Add fresh coriander.

EAT, GORGE, CONSUME! MAKE MERRY! 

At this rate, my first book will be Soph's Big Book Of Fucking Amazing Sandwiches.

Merry Christmas xxx

Another Brick In The Wall

The stories in the news at the moment about selective education has made me ruminate on my Grammar school education.

I had the fortune to grow up in a town that had two secondary schools - a standard co-ed high school and a co-ed, no-fees grammar school. At the beginning of year 6 (I think) we all went and sat the 11+. I assume it was an optional exam, but it's not an option I can remember discussing. It was my first experience of a proper exam, all formally spaced tables in a large and alien hall on a Saturday morning. It terrified me. The stress of waiting to find out if I'd got in or not was ruinous to my mental health, as an already anxious 11 year old, but when I passed, I got one of the highest marks in the school. The following September, off I went in my expensive uniform clutching my expensive and heavy set textbooks that I never used.
Now, we didn't have a lot of money when I was little. We weren't on benefits because my dad earned a little too much, but that money was spread among a lot more people than is standard. We were very working class, and most of my friends' parents were horrified at this tall, sweary, untidy and hideous urchin befriending their special snowflake. Conversely, my mum absolutely HATED all the posh  friends I made. Until I was in year 9 or 10, I didn't have friends round very often, but neither did I make the friends that I kept for life until then, so no great loss.
School, for me, was something of a hideous nightmare. There was the bullying - daily do I give thanks that I never had to catch the bus to school. There was the bullying from staff, who occasionally joined in. There was the constant feeling of not being quite good enough. I have an old school report which says that I got 75% in a geography exam, and I was 22nd out of 25. This all got ramped up considerably running up to my GCSEs when all staff decided that the best way to get good results and finally beat Louth to the top of the county league tables was a campaign of demented terror. Every teacher became fucking Saruman, standing at the front of the hall, gravely intoning the awful fate that would befall those who could not be arsed. We might end up...poor.
I got 11 GCSEs. I went on to do five AS levels, but again was hobbled by a mixture of anxiety, discovering sex, and being taught in half my subjects by my nemesis. This teacher, in hindsight, was fairly innocuous and trying to get work out a woman who was far more interested in gigs and sexting and whose grandparents were dropping like flies. Alas that her main way of getting work out of me was to humiliate me in front of the class pretty much every week, in small ways like refusing to believe I had read a Nobel prize winning book in one evening, or just giving me the evil eye. I was never going to be a good student, but being taught by her meant I just didn't go to half my lessons all year. Then I got a B in her main subject, by essentially teaching it to myself.
But it was too late by then, I had given up, quit, and left after AS study leave. What I should have done was dropped a couple of subjects or switched to the other teaching group, but being teenage and grumpy and dramatic, I thought my only option was carrying on miserable or quitting. I had an idea I would go to college and become a nursery nurse, and even had a placement secured, but then my mum said I should stay at home and look after my sister instead. I agree, and also applied to do a nursing diploma at university, against some opposition from my boyfriend and family at the time. I was rejected, which fair broke my old heart. I ended up looking after my sister for over a year, and then moved away and got my first and only real job. The only reason they offered my shy, teenage self the job was because I'd been to Grammar school,

I'm still poor. I still ended up divorced. I still ended up on benefits. My kid's still disabled. I still live in a hovel. These are things that are supposed to be assuaged by a better class of education.

I mean, aside from getting a decent job by dint of being employed by a Grammar snob, I met my future husband at school. I learnt to write persuasively there, and I learnt to be intensely critical of everything, particularly myself. But my love of learning, of academia, of pushing myself did not come from school. That came later. I didn't go to university when my peers did, making me feel inferior, not to mention lonely. I remember going to a careers advice interview in year 12 and telling them I wanted to do a nursing diploma, and they stared at me aghast. Why not...go to med school? Why be a nurse when you can be a doctor? What sort of fucked up attitude is that? It is a blessed miracle I have a high-grade maths GCSE at all; there's no way in a thousand years I could get the grades for med school, even if I wanted to.

I now live in a city that doesn't have a Grammar, but does have a private school that takes a minimal amount of students on scholarships. It has twelve other mainstream secondary schools. There is fierce competition over which secondary school children go to, as there was in the area I previously lived in, where there were only three secondary schools and a private Grammar covering an enormous rural area. Our local secondary school is over the road, and I would no more willingly send my child to it than send him to a lion pit. That's my prejudice, my snobbery, but also based on its appalling GCSE grades. This is despite the fact that I KNOW that GCSEs grades do not necessarily equate to a good school experience. I was the most miserable girl on my throne of good grades.

The problem was succinctly put in a tweet I saw this morning from Professor David Andress of Portsmouth Uni: "What we see in the 'grammars' debate is an underlying certainty that it is impossible to educate everyone well, & a waste of time to try." It is so difficult to maintain any sort of standard in secondary education, whether because of appalling staff culture, the problems of academisation and having schools run as PR campaigns, or simply having too many students without motivation to try. Whichever area you live in, whether it be an area where having a two tier system is normal, or an area which is awash with average high schools, league tables are still used. Performance is still rated. Schools are compared by parents, who strive to get their children into the objectively best schools, hoping to give them a better start. Parents like the option of a Grammar school, not always because they are snobs or victims of class culture, but because they want to give their children a better education and they perceive that to be beyond the scope of standard high schools. Maybe instead of bollocking on about Grammar schools, the predominantly privately educated government needs to raise the profile and status of standard secondary education. Children do not deserve to be written off at the tender age of 11 because they went to the 'wrong' school, or failed to pass an entrance exam because they were stressed, or anxious, or upset about something else entirely.

Being bullied

TW: Sexual assault, violence, self harm.

When I was five, I looked like this.

Then, when I was eleven, I looked like this:

Now, I look like this (on a good day):

But in my head, I will always look like this:

You see, I was born with a malformed top jaw. Not something you notice much when your milk teeth come through, but my god, when I got my adult teeth, it was about as noticeable as you could get. I developed trichotillomania when I was 11 and scalped myself. So, going into secondary school I had the teeth of a deformed chipmunk and the hairline of Friar Tuck.

I suppose, all things considered, bullying was inevitable.

But this is the thing. I was bullied from starting school.

I don't know why. I was a fairly innocuous child. I was probably fucking annoying and a know it all because some things never change, but for some reason, a few girls in the year above me took against me and took up arms. I remember, aged five, being held, face-first, against a wall. I remember them telling me to come to the toilet with them in lunch, to be told a secret, and instead called names until I cried. 

Then my adult teeth came and lo, the bullying went up accordingly. I was already an easy target, probably because I didn't have many friends and didn't socialise outside school. But it's one thing to be targeted by a couple of bored girls, and something else to be targeted by everyone. They even stole my fucking lunch. It reached something of a nadir in year six, when I was first sexually assaulted on school grounds, and later had the shit beaten out of me by four boys, on the local park for the crime of being there. It followed me everywhere. At least when I was on holiday or at home, I could get my older brother to come and look threateningly at people. At school, I was mostly on my own. 

No wonder I ripped out half my hair.

And then. Secondary school. Oh the endless fucking DELIGHT of starting school looking like a morlock and having six foot tall, sixteen year old boys think nothing of calling me names across the playground, because all year seven girls need that on their plate. I developed a cruel and crude sense of humour to deal with it, and tried to give it back as good as I got. It occasionally got me into trouble, and being called names is not the worst thing that's ever happened. Of course, it felt like it at the time. Nobody ever had a crush on me, for example, because of the awful shame associated with being attracted to a morlock. I used to get in fights outside school, because I didn't want them to call me names anymore. There was a small crowd of 'cool' boys, who really took umbrage at my existence, particularly in shared lessons. One of them decided the best way to make his mates laugh was to put a piece of the cheesewire we used for cutting up modelling foam in DT around my neck. I couldn't breathe. I nearly knifed him in the face with a handy craftknife. I believe they left me alone after that.

I developed a few bad habits to deal with the constant angsty pain of existence. A bullied teenager is a most unhappy sight. I drank. I drank a lot. I drank often. I used drugs, now and then, mainly to deal with crippling social anxiety (sorry mum). And I beat myself bloody, because I hated myself so much I wanted to be anything else. 

Now. I am 31 years old. I have grown up. I have three gorgeous children. Despite being so hideously ugly, it has been constantly remarked on since I was five, I have got through two husbands. I know! The greed! Three years ago, I went back to my old secondary school for a reunion. I didn't want to go. I got so drunk the night before, I ripped a hole in my stomach lining. Then I got drunk in the car park before we went in. I couldn't bear the thought of being back in the torture chamber. I drank more as we went around to deal with it, disguised as orange juice. Then we went to the pub. It was that sort of a weekend.

And do you know something? There were quite a few of my former tormentors there, and none of them said a thing. They smiled. They nodded. They moved on. They remembered me, because I'm fairly memorable, but they don't remember every word they said to me fifteen years ago. That would be silly. They have moved on.

I have not.

I will never be wholly comfortable with the way I look because I was told every day for twelve years that I was hideous, either directly, or through a look, or a snigger, or a whispered comment. I will never really believe that I am worth a second glance. I hope I will stop hating myself for the way I look, but then worry that my children will be bullied in turn when people tell me how much they look like me. I doubt I will ever be cured of the anxiety I now recognise has been part of my life since I was pre-pubescent. Anxiety that people will shout at me, that they will follow me down the street threatening me. Anxiety about walking through a group of teenagers, because even at 31, they make me feel fourteen and a target again. I rarely go back to the town I grew up in, partly because it's a shithole, but mostly because it's full of memories. That's the alley I ran down when those boys were chasing me. That's the street those men threatened me on.That's the part of the park I was beaten up on. That's where I used to sit on my own with the dog because I had no friends. That's my loneliness. That's my pain. That's my lack of safety. That's my teenage years in a shitty nutshell. 

And therein lies the problem with bullying. Kids will be kids. Kids will shout names at others. Kids will take against what is different. Kids will hurt. Kids will fight.  Kids don't mean it. 

They didn't mean it.

Roast Chicken For Your Soul

When I am sad, and stressed, and wrung out like a filthy bit of kitchen rag, I make roast chicken. I made it yesterday when Jimmy came out of hospital. I made it on the first day Tom went back to work after the baby was born. I make it on Mondays, when everything sucks. I make it on Sundays, when everything will suck. I make it on Tuesdays because nobody likes Tuesdays. Tuesday feels like the entire week has risen up in front of you, defiant.. I make it because my children will clear their plates and I feel like I've done something right for once. I make it for no reason other than it tastes good and I feel better for creating something so quintessentially domestic.

My mother taught me to make a roast dinner, but she would spurn this as incomplete. Many people would.  Where is the bread sauce, the stuffing, the cauliflower cheese, the carrots, the mash, the proper roasties? BISTO GRAVY? Heathen. You can add all those things and more, and I do when the mood takes me, but this is not for then. This is for comfort; not the stress of a thousand things in the oven at once, of mashing, and mixing, and burning hot fat sploshing all over the place. This is the easy base from which all else can rise. This is for days when chopping things up is about all you can manage. And the washing up isn't too evil either. 

You will need a chicken, a lemon, some butter, some waxy potatoes, some garlic, some dried rosemary, some salt, some green vegetable and Bisto.

First, get your chicken. I would rather eat good chicken once a month than shit chicken every week, so I buy a free range one from a supermarket. It costs about twice what a battery chicken does, and it's not guaranteed to be twice as ethical, or even twice as tasty, but there is nothing more depressing than some poor pale creature that has lived out its six weeks of life up to its eyeballs in shit, crammed into a tiny space. If you are minted, buy an organic chicken. But try free range as a minimum. 

If you get your chicken from the supermarket, it will have the cooking time in minutes on the front of the packaging, if you cook it at 180 degrees. Note this. If you don't, there are sundry guides to cooking times on the internet. Preheat your oven. 

Get a roasting pan. I have two medium sized ones that are differently shaped, to accommodate chickens which are fatter or longer. Put a massive sheet of baking parchment in the bottom of the pan. This serves two purposes - it collects the juice, and it stops the chicken sticking to the bottom of the pan, which is a shitter to wash up.

Put the chicken in the baking parchmented-pan. Cut the string tying its little legs together, and untuck them from the cavity. The legs will spring open, like a birthing woman. Leave them there.

Get some salted butter. Cut a chunk off - how much depends on how sad you are - and blast it for five seconds in the microwave. Take it  into your paw and smear it about your chicken. All over the breast, the legs, the wings, the weird bits between the legs and breast. Wash your hands before you absent-mindedly wipe them on your jeans.

Take the lemon. Cut the lemon in half. Don't spray yourself in the eye as you do this. Take one half of the lemon and squeeze it all over your buttery beast. When that half is well emptied, shove it up the chicken's arse. Yes, you read that correctly. Keep the other juicy half; you'll need it later.

Sprinkle a little salt over the breast. I use a small amount of sea salt for this, because it makes the skin taste even more delicious. Saxa table salt is fine though.Don't overdo it.

Remember the cooking time for the bird? Stick your bird, uncovered, in the oven, and note (mentally or on your phone or on paper or whatever) what time it will be finished, and when it will be an hour from finished. 

Go do something else for a bit. A bath. A read. The telly. After half an hour, the house will begin to smell of chickeny goodness, and you will get hungry. 

About an hour before your chicken will be ready, get an ovenproof dish out, the sort you do pasta bake or cottage pie in. Get your waxy potatoes. I use Charlotte ones. They're a quid a bag from Tesco, but use whatever you like. Guess how many you might like to eat - we will generally eat a whole kilo between two of us. Adjust for numbers and greed. Chop them up. Doesn't matter how. I take the ends off, then slice them into rounds. Sometimes I do them as chunks, which tend to crisp up a bit better in the oven. However you do them, they need to be not-too-thin. Too thin makes the equivalent of crisps, and that is not what you want right now. Too thick and they don't quite cook through. Between a penny and a pound in thickness. When they are chopped, put them in the ovenproof dish. Slosh some olive oil over them. Squeeze the other half of the lemon over them. Sprinkle a little rosemary over; not too much or you'll just taste rosemary. Crush some garlic. How much garlic? How much do you like? One to two cloves gives a pleasant waft to the thing. Five gives a punch. Add that to the dish - I use a garlic crusher because then it melts into the potatoes and you don't get the nasty crunch of an unexpected slice. Add a good sprinkle of salt. Then mix it all up with your hands. Make sure each potato piece gets a bit oiled. If you think it's too wet, drain a little liquid into the sink. If you think it's too dry, add a little more oil. Cut the juiced lemon half into half again. It will be all sad and squidgy and dead, but it gives such life to the dish. Chuck it in. 

Put the dish in the oven. It will take between 45 and 60 minutes to cook, which should align with your chicken being cooked. Give them a stir if you think they're burning, but I always forget to check them, and they never do. Your hands will smell so good, you will want to eat them. Don't eat them. Wash them before you wipe them on your jeans. 

You have an hour-ish to kill. Go and do something relaxing. My god, your house smells amazing now, doesn't it?

I don't know what green vegetable you like. I tend to cook broccoli, green beans, peas, asparagus in season, or a mix of all of them. If you want them to be ready at the same time as the chicken, you'll need to be ready to cook them around 15 minutes before the chicken is done, but the nice thing about this is that unless you get stuck on the phone to someone or fall asleep or have an asthma attack, an extra ten or so minutes in the oven won't hurt. 

Is your chicken ready? You can skewer it to check - in the deepest part of the thigh, shove something sharp and then observe the juices that bubble forth. If they're clear, you're good. If they're pinkish, give it another five to ten minutes. I tend to trust the supermarket, and don't check. I deserve food poisoning. If your chicken is ready, remove it with a flourish, close the oven door and turn it off - you can leave the potatoes in there for a bit, they won't spoil. 

This chicken had twenty minutes longer than it should have, thanks to screaming children. Still tasted amazing. 

Leave your chicken on the side for a moment while you put a load of Bisto into a bowl. How much Bisto? I don't know. I like my gravy ludicrously thick, so I put in a fair bit. I don't think Bisto is really an exact science. 

To get your chicken from pan to plate is not necessary if you feel like just ripping the chicken off the carcass and shoving it into your face, and this chicken is so good, I wouldn't blame you at all. But I move mine out of the pan and onto a plate using a big spoon and a fish slice. I take the lemon out of the cavity, put the spoon in the cavity, and then use the fish slice to lift it from the pan onto the plate. Truly, I am an elegant genius. Should you drop your chicken on the floor...pick it up with a tea towel. You won't though. If I, clumsiest of women, can do this, so can you. You can put a foil tent over it if you don't think everything else will be ready for ages, but a cooler chicken is much easier to attack with hands and knife. 

You should now have a pan of delicious chicken juice and buttery lemonyness. Put some into your dry bowl of Bisto. No water yet, just juices and Bisto. It will look deeply unappetising and nothing like gravy. Fear not.

Mmm, slurry au Bisto avec jus de poulet!

Boil the kettle. While it boils, drain your veg and take the potatoes out of the oven.Give the potatoes a bit of a prod, to check they're cooked. They should YIELD. I love that word - yield. Give way. Fall to the sword that is the point of your little knife.

Your chicken should be covered in a golden skin, with speckles of crusty salt and generally look and smell beautiful. So beautiful it may be difficult to come to terms with the necessary carving. Do yourself a favour: rip some chicken skin off and eat it. Eat some more. Stab any wandering hands trying to steal your chicken skin with a fork. This is the definitive cook's perk. By the time you've eaten the skin, you should have a beautiful white breast looking up at you with a bone running down the centre. Put a sharp knife down either side of this bone. This parts the breast off the skeleton of the bird, making it far easier to carve. Men like carving on the bone, all knives and dead beast. I do not. Should this technique fail you, rip it off any which way you can. It all goes down the same way. 

Plate up. Chicken, potatoes, veg. Now pour just enough boiling water into your chickeny Bisto slurry to turn it into the consistency you want. In our house, that's basically meaty custard. Stir it vigorously with a fork. Pour it over your chicken, potatoes and veg. Eat it. Eat it all. Wonder why you ever feared roasting a chicken. It tastes good. It tastes safe, and comforting, warm and homely. It is balm. And you made it all by yourself. 

I have a confession. This chicken dinner didn't have gravy, I just lobbed some pan juices over it at the end because I was tired. And I made Ellabell Risbridger's amazing garlic kale instead of plain greens, but god it was good. It is always good. 

Leftover chicken mixed with mayonnaise and mango chutney make the best sandwiches I have ever had the pleasure of eating. You can also use them to make some sort of stir-in-sauce meal the next day. The leftover carcass, boiled in plain water for a few hours, makes the most delicious jelly of a stock. A chicken is a useful thing. But firstly, you get this meal, and that is always worth the effort. 

With thanks to Nigella Lawson's roast chicken in How To Eat, which is a must-read for food lovers, even if you have no idea how the oven goes on. 

Anxiety

If I start to think, then I will die.
That's how it starts, how it always starts. I think about what's to come, whether it is a party, an appointment or just seeing a friend. And I become convinced that way lies death. Or illness. Or disaster. That nothing can ever go right again in this world, because doom.
It is not rational. If it was rational, I would not be unwell. I would be normal.

It started when the baby was born. It started when I found out I was pregnant. It started when we decided to get pregnant. It started when I got knocked out. It started when Jimmy was diagnosed. It started with the divorce. It started when Jack was born. It started when he left. It started when Jimmy was born. It started when I bought the old house. It started when I lost a baby. It started when I left school. It started when I started grammar school. It started when I was at primary school.
I can't put a date on it. It's only recently that I've realised fear has haunted me since I was a child. But there is a chasm of difference between a child's fear of monsters, of bullies, of loss, and an adult's all consuming terror of the vagaries in life.

I am frightened of tiny things, like the buttons you use to call a lift, and the postman's knock. I am frightened of massive things, like cot death, and accidents, and horrible life changing illness. I have daily intrusive thoughts about bizarre things; whole hideous scenarios play out in my head and I live them in a little side room of my brain.I haven't had a panic attack in over a month, and this is a major achievement. I feel like I am getting better, although sometimes I have a blip. I am currently having a blip.

I decided a while ago, that talking about anxiety and fear was BOUND to make the things I feared most come true. I kept it all inside. I thought, believed, knew that if I told anyone what I was afraid of, or discussed things I was looking forward to, everything terrible would happen. And I made myself ill. My anxiety manifested as burning joint pains, as terrible headaches, as weakness and exhaustion, because I wouldn't let myself express it. Being pregnant changed that, because my terror of losing my baby was a real fear I could talk about, and channel all the extraneous fear into. It was a rational thing to worry about, although the fear paralysed me at the end, making me angry, agoraphobic and terrified.

I felt like I was destined to have postnatal depression after Alex was born because of the all consuming terror of his pregnancy, but instead I have postnatal anxiety. And that is a very different beast. I had PND after Jimmy was born, and all I wanted to do was die. Or run away. Mostly die. I didn't feel anything towards my baby, myself, or anyone. I didn't have the energy to do anything about it, and eventually it lifted. Postnatal anxiety is much easier in some respects, because I love my baby. I interact with him. I take immeasurable pleasure from what he does, and cuddles, and feeding. I am able to function reasonably well, to get work and chores done and to look after the big boys as well. But it taints everything. It is like a sad gauze I have draped gently over everything. My mind runs at a thousand miles an hour, trying to sort the rational from the irrational. I try to talk it out when it's particularly bad, because other people can tell me the difference between legitimate fear and crazy fear.

This blip has been triggered by incoming essay deadlines, a surgery date for Jimmy, an appointment for my eye, socialising, Christmas, breaking my laptop-that-isn't-technically-mine, Jimmy's DLA form, parents' evening, the dentist, and a hormone shift, which are all legitimate worries that mount into one giant elephant in the brain, sitting on the sensible bit, squashing it flat.

And it feels like horror. A tight chest, breathlessness, getting too hot, visualising everything awful, wanting to stop everything, paralysing fear, no concentration, feeling snappy, guilty, angry and hopeless.

And it sucks. But it's getting better.

NHS Bureaucrazy

I am cross.
Last year, I had a head injury that led to concussion and whiplash. I had all sorts of terrifying symptoms at the time like slurring, amnesia, dizziness, nausea, night blindness, peripheral vision loss and anomic aphasia. I couldn't stand up for a week, but I was back to normal within a few weeks.
Except that I still have a small blind spot in my peripheral vision. At first, I thought I was imagining it, and ignored it. Then I went for an eye test a month ago, mentioned it, had all the tests done and was referred because I wasn't imagining it.
Normally, if you have a dodgy eye test, the optician refers you directly to the hospital, but (presumably because of the head injury) I had to go and visit my GP first and talk about it to decide whether to send me to ophthalmology or neurology. The GP thought it was either caused by damage to my retina, optic nerve or visual cortex. The initial injury was on the right side, but it's my left eye that's affected. She referred me to ophthalmology. This was early last week, because GP appointments are gold dust.

Now, the bit that's made me cross.
Today, I got a letter that looked suspiciously like junk mail. I get a lot of junk mail at the moment, thanks to foolishly letting the Bounty woman have my details in the hospital after Alex was born. So, I opened it, expecting yet another life insurance offer because PARENTS DIE, and instead found a letter from some random fucking 'care innovations' company who the LGC apparently employ to triage ophthalmology referrals. Obviously, GPs cannot be trusted to refer to the right people, so this company in Henley-on-Thames does it for them.
The letter told me I needed to be triaged by an optometrist, and gave me a list of four clinics to go to for triage. In order to select one, I had to either ring up and tell them who I wanted to be referred to, or go online and do it. WHY NOT JUST SEND ME TO THE NEAREST? WHY THE FUCK WOULD I WANT TO GO TO A CLINIC 30 MILES AWAY?
Ahem.
So, I did this, only to be told that my 'chosen provider' will send me an appointment in the post.
*jumps up and down in a rage*

In ye olden days of eye referrals pre-NHS-sell-off, you saw your optician, they sent a referral to your GP who passed it on to ophthalmology, who trusted their secretaries to triage it and send you a suitable appointment. The process took perhaps a couple of weeks. This has already taken a month.
Now, I don't talk about it much because it's evil, but I am suffering quite severe postnatal anxiety at the moment. The very IDEA of going blind, never exactly appealing in the first place, has been preying on my mind like a giant wasp that will not stop hovering by my face. All I really want is an appointment to be told what the hell is up with my eye, so I can work my flailing anxiety into something like a sensible approach to the whole thing. And now I have to go and see an optometrist, who will then probably send me to ophthalmology anyway, lengthening the whole process into one of months rather than weeks.

Not to mention how confusing this must be to people who are perhaps less computer savvy or presume the crappy junk-maily scam-ish letter is junk mail, particularly if their sight is poor. I mean, it doesn't even have anything visual to suggest it represents the NHS:

SEEMS LEGIT!

It's almost like they're trying to get people to ignore the letters so they can cancel the referral (she said, cynically).

Anxiety

My second child, Jack, is tiny for his age. He doesn't grow properly, and has poor gross motor skills. He doesn't care - he hurls himself round like a child twice his size. He's being measured again next month, and if his growth is still too far under what it should be, he will probably need a referral to check up on him. He's currently on the 9th centile for height, and 50th centile for weight. He is a BALL and he bounces accordingly. He's normal, otherwise, developmentally, so we don't worry too much.

Jack suffered from intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR) when he was inside me. My bump stopped growing at 34 weeks. When I was in labour at 42 weeks, my bump measured 33cm. It should have been around 42cm. His smallness was noted, but no action was taken. It was assumed by my midwives that I was losing a lot of weight from my marital split, and therefore I had a smaller bump.
To demonstrate how small I was:

34+5 with Jack. 20w with current baby.

I put on 8lb total in that pregnancy. At 38 weeks, a different midwife worried he was breech and sent me for a scan. His foetal weight was estimated at 7lb. At 40 weeks, my usual midwife finally sent me for a growth scan, because I was on call for a homebirth with a clinically SFD baby. They estimated his foetal weight at 8lb, and sent me home to wait for birth.
He was born two weeks later, at 42 weeks precisely, on my sofa after a predictably short labour. I was due to be induced six hours later, but had a strong feeling that having my waters broken or labour augmented would be the wrong decision. I also woke up the day before he was born convinced he would die. I'd had a lot of negative thoughts like that in the buildup to having him, but that was an acute, passionate feeling of something going wrong.
He suffered decelerations during his second stage of labour, but since I was at home, there wasn't much to be done except push harder. He was born in fine fettle, quiet and alert with a head of long, gingery hair. But his cord had nearly killed him.

Jack's cord had two, true, figure-of-eight, tight knots in it, about 10cm apart. One true knot is fairly rare, and is one of more common causes of stillbirth. Two knots is so rare as to be reported in medical journals. They had been in place since around the 9th week of pregnancy. They could have tightened, and killed him, at any point from them. They'd reduced his placental flow. They'd given him a thick, horrible cord. They'd tightened as he was being born. The backflow from this caused me to have a fairly horrible haemorrhage as I lay cuddling him.

He survived. I'm still not sure how. He weighed 7lb 12oz, which was 25th centile using the universal centile system, 8th centile for my particular variables. His growth scans had overestimated his weight considerably. In comparison, his older brother was 9lb 1oz, and almost two weeks earlier.

Isn't he gorgeous?

His birth has left me with anxiety and fear about this baby like you wouldn't believe. I am under consultant care, more for the haemorrhage and IUGR than the knots themselves. There is no way to predict or diagnose true knots before delivery. I'm having growth scans to check this baby grows to my schedule (which predicts a term birthweight of around 9lb) and also to check umbilical flow. I want another homebirth, but nothing can be decided until they know the baby's growth is OK.

This would be fine and reassuring (and it is), except I've also got a lot of bad feelings that have resurfaced about Jack's pregnancy. I suffered from severe antenatal depression when I was expecting him, primarily because my ex left. I wasn't concerned about his lack of growth. I didn't care. I'm quite sure had I displayed any concern for my tiny bump, they would have perhaps picked something up sooner. Instead, I ignored it. I ignored him. It was easier.
I get flashbacks. All the time. They're usually related to significant pregnancy events, like midwife appointments, endless blood tests and scans, but also the general condition of pregnancy is a reminder. I never wanted to feel how I did when I was expecting Jack again. I never wanted to wake up hating the world, dreading the day ahead, fearing every phone call, not wanting to leave the house.
But I do.

Not all the time. But the flashbacks are vicious and they hurt. They are like normal pregnancy anxiety + the anxiety I should have had for Jack + guilt + anger that I was ever made to feel like that. I cry a lot, and I let myself do it. I'm trying to get this grief and anger and pain and terror out of the way, in the most natural way I can think of. I sat on it last time. I can't do that again.

In many ways, feeling like this is normal. Feeling like this a natural consequence of my last pregnancy. Pregnancy is never just about THIS baby, it's about all the babies that have been before.
It may also be related to the B12 deficiency anaemia I get in every pregnancy. B12 is one of those vitamins that you don't realise you need until you haven't got enough. Then your nerves stop working properly, you faint a lot, you become depressed, you feel so tired you might die, and you go a ghastly luminescent colour. I haven't had my blood tested since November, but I suspect it's contributing to the feelings of doom.

It's just hard. It's hard to talk to happy, first time pregnant ladies and compare notes, without sounding like a doom-laden horror crow. I've never wanted to be a woman who terrifies people with birth stories, but it seems to happen anyway. It's hard to be honest when people ask how it's going, to not just weep because I can't walk properly (possible side effect of birth injury, I've got physio next week, thank god) and I'm so tired, and I'm so scared.

But it's not all the time. And the crucial difference is that I want this baby. I'm terrified because I want him to be OK so much. I want a safe birth. I want a healthy child. I want to be well afterwards - I really wasn't well after Jack was born, because of birth injuries and haemorrhaging, and I'm afraid of that happening again. I want so much that most people take for granted with their pregnancies, and all I can concentrate on is how it might go wrong.

I've not written this for sympathy, or anything really except in the hope that giving it an audience might help somehow. If anyone wants to see the double knotted cord, shout and I'll send you the picture - it's way too grim to post on here though.
Only 18 weeks to go!