Birth in all its grim glory: The Devil’s Whore, Cold Feet and Threads

Enough birth brickbats. Here are some bouquets.

1. The Devil’s Whore. Evaded charges of ludicrousness by omitting labour completely, instead showing us an exhausted Andrea Riseborough leaning back against bloodied sheets at the moment of delivery. Good yelling.
2. Fay Ripley in Cold Feet. Again, this looked convincingly fun-free.
3. The poor girl who gives birth to a deformed infant alone in a manky farmyard at the end of Threads. Conveys succinctly how terrible it would be to give birth in a post-apocalyptic world in which care of any kind, let alone from medical professionals, is no longer available.
   One of the fundamental functions of society is to look after and protect expectant mothers and newborns. That brutal conclusion told you there was no hope left, no prospective redemption, and no future; the damage done to the social contract was irreparable.

At my NCT class they told us that, left to our own devices on a desert island, we’d all manage to deliver our babies eventually. It was nice of them to try to make us feel confident. But it was also patently untrue.

More daft birth: how Survivors screwed up

BBC1’s Survivors: whoever put this together has been watching Lost and Heroes, and it’s all the better for it; its characters, being Brits, aren’t as consistently gorgeous, but they’re morally ambiguous while remaining sympathetic, which is the winning hand played by big American dramas at their best. But the recent birth scene was, in one crucial respect, a letdown.

OK, we’d been primed for it to be a quick labour; it was her third, and she was sure it would be as easy as shelling peas, or picking daisies, or something. But the creepy music had warned us that the delivery might turn out not to be as straightforward as the fate-tempting mother anticipated... And lo, it’s breech. Here’s the fatal flaw; it was completely preposterous to suppose that the sexy sister from Nathan Barley would have been happy to push one out with Mumsy Abby and the slick boss from Peep Show looking benignly on.

I know this character was exceptionally Zen – so much so that she responded to the unmedicated schizoid antics of her group leader with warm affection, and instead of deciding it might be a smart move to keep her newborn out of his orbit, volunteered the hope that the baby would help him to recover. But all the same... She might have put up with Abby, just, but Mr Peep Show Boss, delightful though he is, would have almost certainly received some very sweary marching orders. Am totally digging him in his Survivors incarnation, though. I hope it’s true that he’s going to be the new Doctor Who.

Blood and grunts: the daft birth awards

The literary world has its annual Bad Sex awards, but as far as I know there aren’t any statuettes for iffy on-screen nookie performances. Of course sex in the movies doesn’t often look a whole lot like the real thing, for good or ill; it’s a strictly codified and emblematic art form, in which a lady who has just been merrily pluking will wrap a sheet around the entirety of her body in order to leave the sanctuary of the king-sized bed, thus notifying us that she is still modest and adorable despite the hot heave-ho she has, or so we are led to believe, just been receiving (step forward with your head hung in shame, SATC movie.)

Sometimes a sex scene really does convey the urgency of passion – I’d like to single out Ana Lucia and Sawyer in Lost for an honourable mention. Now that looked like she actually wanted it to happen, and who could blame her? Of course, within a couple more episodes she’d been dispatched like a fallen virgin in a horror movie, so there was no opportunity for a recurrence. Still, that particular bit of intimate action came as something of a relief after endless episodes in which they were all cooped up on the island forging alliances and enmities and, on occasion, eyeing each other up, but no-one was actually getting down to it.

Maybe the fear of giving birth sans epidural would have been a powerful disincentive, but actually, given all those long summer evenings with nothing else to do besides go paddling and wait for the Others to come calling – whaddayagonnado? If it was a French series, they’d all have been rutting in rock pools as soon as they’d recovered from the crash landing, retrieved some Gauloises from the hold and had a few long, pause-ridden and enigmatic discussions about Rousseau (the original dude, not the bird with the mad hair.)

Sex in the movies is tricky, but birth really is a sure-fire enticement to absurdity. For starters, as all tremulous mums-to-be learn, labour can go on for days, especially first time round. In this context I’d like to single out Friends for an honourable mention. OK, so Jennifer Aniston looked as if she was stretched out on a spa bed with mild indigestion rather than undergoing an experience you wouldn’t wish on a suspected terrorist, but hey, it is a comedy, and at least the writers made a joke out of poor old Rachel’s failure to progress.

The other thing that was excellent about that episode was how Rachel ended up cooped up with Janice. In the throes of labour even a relatively benign presence could be just as invasive as that honking comic monster; there’s nothing like the ward round walking in to put you off your stride, though you should probably be grateful, on balance, that somebody’s actually bothering to check up on you.

Dreamscape: under the pillars of the flyover

Last night I dreamed I was trying to make my way to the first of a number of addresses in London, but it turned out not to be at all close to the tube station - we'd been running for at least five minutes, over carriageways, up hills, past train tracks, and in all that time we hadn't seen a soul - the city was, as it really is, complex, greenless and literally built up, blotting out the horizon and reaching up into the sky, but it was also, as it never is outside of apocalyptic movies, completely deserted. The structures required to accomodate traffic were present, but no-one else was passing through.

Then I saw someone jogging towards us along a walkway that circumnavigated the great concrete pillars of the flyover overhead. Not just one, but a long line of people, perhaps 30 or so, separated by perfectly regular intervals. When I saw the first one, I thought, this is trouble, we're going to be mugged; when I saw the rest I thought we would probably be okay, as they were smiling and appeared to recognise me.

They ran down the walkway to join us at ground level, and it transpired that they were a group of friends from a school near where I grew up; they'd published a magazine together before graduating and abruptly falling out. We talked quickly about what had happened to us all since we last met and I introduced them to my daughter, a sulky dark-haired girl who didn't look too sure about any of this. Then I woke up with my heart pounding.

So I guess starting this blog freaked me out a little - it's the immediacy of it, and the fact that it's out there, bread cast upon the waters. It's great, though. It's a much more promising note from my sleeping self than the one I got after a lone agent responded to a synopsis with an invitation to submit my three chapters, then sent them back with a form letter by return of post. I dreamed then that the gates of a megalopolis had slammed shut. It was all going on in there, but there was no way I was going to be admitted.

But like Holly Golightly says, there's nothing quite so sad as being the person with your nose pressed up against the window, wanting to be on the other side.

I've come to the conclusion I'm a crap novelist, anyway. I really can't be bothered making stuff up when there's so much real stuff out there that's so much better than anything I could invent. I guess that's a failure of imagination, but imagination does have its limits. From time to time I read or watch something and think No, there's no way, you're not telling me the truth, there's no way that ever happened that way, and then the story's spoilt and I can't be doing with it. Inauthenticity is a killer.

Shopping on the verge of a breakdown

It's a melancholy experience, Christmas shopping in the credit crunch. No bargain is quite bargainous enough to assuage the fear; no discount sufficiently steep that it could not be better still. Deep down most of us probably believe the old saw that you get what you pay for. If prices can be so abruptly reduced, perhaps it's not the case that you've got your sticky fingers on a purchasing opportunity you'd be a fool to let slip; maybe it's just evidence of how blatantly you were being ripped off before the markdown. And so the dopamine rush of being a good consumer has been replaced, in malls across the globe, by hesitation and a niggling sense of disappointment...

Or so I thought yesterday, after an hour or so trawling clothes shops to very little avail - if it's half-price, silk and dry-clean only, or creased, itchy, boob-crushing or camel's toe-inducing, I'd still rather not, thanks. But today the pair of shoes I'd had my beady eyes on for months turned up on a rack outside the store for £30 less than the original price, and I have to say I swooped on them as efficiently as a bird of prey alighting on its next snack, as if generations of evolution had fine-tuned my responses for no less a purpose. And felt mightily satisfied afterwards, if still just a teeny bit guilty...

Yesterday I tried half-heartedly to negotiate a discount, and failed dismally. The secret of successful haggling, I've been told, is to be prepared to walk away - which I did. But that means you can never allow yourself to really want the thing you're about to haggle for. The bargain itself, and not the object you're bargaining for, must become your aim.