World’s Oldest Mother Dies
This is a sad tale of a lady who gave birth at 66 to twins and then died a couple of years later.
I would never want to be a father at my age of 62, let alone a mother. It’s just too much responsibility.
But you can’t impose laws on maximum ages to give birth as what would be law in say the UK, would be legal in a country that didn’t want to make it illegal. Also, there have been cases of natural conceptions of women in their late fifties. With people getting fitter and healthier, it will not be long before a healthy baby arrives to a woman over sixty, who felt that the need for contraception had passed.
It’s a difficult dilemma and it just goes to show how easy for some it is to get pregnant.
Saving Fuel and the Planet
I have two cars; a Jaguar Estate and a Lotus Elan, which I use depending on the weather and who I want to impress or show up. Is that wrong?
But turn up at an engineering company in the Lotus and you get a crowd of people admiring it. I should say that it’s Norfolk Mustard or bright yellow and it does stand out. It’s also a very cheap car to run, as it does over thirty to the gallon, is very simple, has a very good Isuzu engine, so servicing is cheap. As an example, in the seventeen years my late wife and I have owned the car, it’s only had one new exhaust, a couple of of window motors and I think a brake cylinder. To cap it all the insurance is well under £300 a year. Depreciation is probably about zero and the car is still worth about £8-9,000.
You could argue that this is a truly green car (so it’s yellow), in that it’s lifetime carbon emmissions would actually be very low, because the car wouldn’t be scrapped after a few years. How much carbon dioxide is emmitted making a car? Actually not that much according to this report, but others disagree. But because Lotuses use plastic bodies, do they actually capture carbon?
The Jaguar is a workhorse and allows me to move the bits and pieces I need. I don’t really need it now, as it is too big for just me and my basset hound, but I probably won’t change it and just drive it a couple of times round the clock.
Normally, around the UK, I drive the Jaguar within the speed limits and typically would return about 44 miles of so to the gallon. On trips on continental motorways, driving at about 60-70 mph, I regularly return the mythical 10 m iles per litre. Now there’s a really crazy measurement, but it’s a good level for all cars to achieve.
On my last trip to Holland, I got stuck in traffic around Rotterdam and in the first hour, I did just about 25 miles. So to get the ferry with ease, I stepped on the gas (diesel) and drove at about ninety all the way to the ferry. And then on the trip up from Dover, I went with the traffic which was about eighty, rather than a legal seventy.
Now, the interesting thing, is that I returned only 37 miles per gallon. This was a sixteen percent increase in consumption.
So perhaps we should encourage people to drive to the limits to help save the planet.
The Irreverent Widow
I’ve just added a site called The Irreverent Widow to this blog.
Being widowed is a serious business and it needs a bit of humour and a lot of commonsense.
This is a typical comment.
In grief, as in dog walking, one must ask: “Is putting the poop in a plastic bag & tossing it really the wisest way to deal with it?”
Not sure. But we need a lot more robust thinking on death and widowhood.
I shall be reading more.
J In Wales
This is another blog on widowhood.
I liked this post on shearing sheep. What was it W. C. Fields said about children and animals?
Another Bloody Friday
The television is bad again, just like it was the last Friday I was in England.
At least there’s QI on Dave. What a weird name for a television channel!
Ragwort
To anybody who keeps horse or cattle, ragwort is a curse. It can kill, although there are various people, who say that it is not as dangerous as we think. That is an interesting attitiude, but what happens if an expensive horse, cow or other animal is poisoned and dies?
So I just don’t like it.
They’ve even got lots of it in Holland.
Ragwort in Holland
But as it says on the DEFRA web site.
Over 90% of complaints that Defra receives about injurious weeds concern ragwort.
To me there is only one thing to do. Make sure it isn’t there! We all need something to hate occassionally and ragwort is a good place to start!
Waiting for Apollo 11 – Part 3
The Tuesday was a day of waiting. They broke the waters in mid-morning and nothing happened. And then in mid-afternoon, contractions started.
Now my late wife wasn’t a lady with a large frame. Although she was nearly 5ft 5in, she was really only a size 8, so getting the baby out, when he finally arrived after midnight, was a bit of a messy business. Our first son was also about 8lb 5oz, so he was not small and she had quite a few stitches. Luckily, the student doctor , who was nicknamed Smooth Hugh, was very very good.
So that night I got back to Barnet about three in the morning, with mother and son doing well.
In other words exactly forty years ago.
But the time in the hospital was not without tragedy. The lady in the next bed with the unusual ring, lost her baby. Her son was born with a hole in the diaphragm, which meant he was unable to breathe.
But in those days of no ultrasound, it was impossible to diagnose the condition. Six years ago, my granddaughter had the same condition. It was diagnosed before birth and she was operated on at two days old. She is now a bouncing ad very normal girl, with no after effects from her ordeal.
So medical science can solve our problems.
But just as my wife was helped through a difficult birth by Smooth Hugh, good surgery helped in a much worse case to enable my granddaughter to survive.
We must train our surgeons to be the best.
Later that day, Apollo 11 blasted off to the moon. My wife told me later that evening, that everyone was gripped as they watched the huge Saturn rocket take off from Florida.
And there was still a shortage of babies in the hospital. They’d even resorted to ringing round hospitals and the message was the same. Everybody must be waiting for the moon landing.
Dutch Water Line
The Water Line is a series of defensive forts, towns, castles and dikes, that was built to protect the Dutch heartland from invasion in the 17th century. It was upgraded for many years, but proved inadequate in the Second World War as it was just by-passed by the Nazis.
This is one of the impressive castles, Slot Loevestein.
Slot Loevestein
The castle, and in fact the whole Water Line, is definitely worth a visit.
Waiting for Apollo 11 – Part 2
To return to the story of my late wife’s first pregnancy. This tale was started under Waiting for Apollo 11.
I stayed all night at the Middlesex Hospital and about midnight, the contractions stopped and I think I fell asleep with my head on her bed.
She was sharing the room with another lady, who was perhaps a ten years older than my wife’s then 21 years. I can’t remember much about her except that she was dark-haired and she had a wedding ring with a buckle in it. But at least my wife had some pleasant company whilst I was not there.
In fact, I remember going to work on that Monday in Welwyn Garden City. You had to do that in those days, as there was no such thing as paternity leave. But at least my bosses were fairly sympathetic.
I returned to the hospital on that Monday evening and nothing had happened.
I seem to think that the hospital had decided that if nothing happened on the Monday, they were going to induce the baby on the Tuesday morning. I probably got a good night’s sleep at my mother-in-law’s in Barnet.
There are other things that I can’t remember. Did I drive up to the hospital in our elderly Morris Minor? Did my mother-in-law visit before the birth? Oh! How you wished you had wrote it all down.
Waiting for Apollo 11
Not many people know where they were on the 13th of July, 1969. I do because my late wife and I spent an enjoyable but apprehensive day in St. James’s Park in London in the sun.
I say apprehensive. Why apprehensive? Because she was just expecting our first child and we did not have a hospital to go to.
So how did we get into this predicament?
We had been living in Liverpool and I was working for ICI, whilst she completed her studies at the University. But soon after we got married in September 1968, her father died and we decided that we needed to be near her mother in London. It was probably not a good idea, but you do things like that when you are young. She had also got recently pregnant, which again was probably not a good idea, but looking back having our three children young was for the best. For the last twenty or more years of our marriage, we were unencumbered by family and were free to do what we enjoyed most; travel!
So, I transferred to ICI Plastics at Welwyn Garden City and we bought a house at Melbourn near Royston. But horror of horrors the house wasn’t ready and we had to move in with her mother in Barnet.
My late wife was adopted and was actually born in the Victoria Maternity Hospital in Barnet. So there was no way she was going to have our first child there, as it had too many bad connotations for her.
So we found ourselves without a hospital to deliver the baby.
I should also say, that on that Sunday, the baby was about three weeks overdue, so even if she didn’t think things were serious, I did.
Late that afternoon, she said that she was having slight contractions and that we perhaps ought to go to A & E somewhere. She preferred the old Middlesex Hospital, as it had a good reputation.
So we presented ourselves at the hospital and after about twenty minutes, she was seen by a doctor and because of her imminent state, they decided to admit her as an emergency.
It didn’t really matter, as they weren’t very full, because everybody was excited about the first moon landing with Apollo 11, scheduled to take place in a few days. And having babies and other important things was far from peoples’ minds.
The Anonymous Widower 