If we don’t act now, the terrible irony is that our great grandchildren will only know of our ancient forests through pictures in books printed on the paper that contributed to their destruction

Publishers Bloomsbury, Penguin, and BBC Books have all made positive statements about use of recycled or environmentally sustainable paper. This is something that I really want to hear, and lately I’ve been glad that I have such a habit of purchasing my books from charity shops, because this is, in effect, recycled paper. I’m still working on the next step, which is to pass on all my books when I have read them, and encourage others to do the same. Perhaps I could start with the encouraging.

via Ethical Consumer

Baby's age: -235 days

It starts when I wake up. In fact, I think it wakes me up. A grumbling, empty, nausea. I lie in bed trying to decide whether it will be worse to go to the bathroom or to stay still. Eventually I work up the courage to sit up and eat a ginger biscuit; I don’t know if this makes any difference.

Breakfast is hard to eat, but I have to have something inside me before the journey to work – don’t want to be passing out on the station. My usual drink at work is hot water with lemon juice, but now I can’t stomach this, and I’ve gone back to tea – weak, milky, and with sugar in, like when I was a child.

The mornings are the worst for sickness, and snacking barely makes it tolerable. I don’t actually throw up very often, but don’t think that this makes it any more pleasant. I feel horrible, miserable, want to go back to bed, where I could feel sick in comfort. I have been sent super olfactory powers, for further torment.

After lunch I pick up a bit, only to be hit by a black cloud of utter tiredness mid-afternoon. This makes me think that the sickness in the morning is the combined effect of hormones and an empty stomach, and the afternoon misery is a blood sugar thing. Or an iron thing. I don’t know, I’m not a scientist.

I get sick again on the way home, but it’s better if I eat something just before I leave work – that’s the empty stomach again, you see.

I scour the web and my growing collection of how-to-be-pregnant books for solutions: dry crackers, ginger, vitamin B. Well I already have vit B in my prenatal supplements, and I find that meals are more effective than snacks, but sadly I can’t have a full meal on the hour every hour, or I’m going to look like I’m pregnant… Comfort foods are the most, well, comforting: pasta, cheese, protein kinda stuff. Peppermint tea is good. If I find the perfect remedy, I’ll let you know.

On the plus side, morning sickness indicates a decreased likelihood of early miscarriage. I have very little anxiety about having another miscarriage, at this point in time. And no, that’s not because I want the sickness to stop. It’s because every waking moment, my general feeling of malaise reminds me that I’m still pregnant.

1. Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson

This is a beautiful book, apart from a few pages of tripe in the middle, and the crappy happy ending. I expect those are the poetic bits that everyone else is moved to tears by, but I reckon that’s a bit of emperor’s new clothesism. Remind me to write about that at some point.

The good part of this book is about how even considering adultery alters the map of a relationship irredeemably for both parties, even though one party may not even know it. Which reminds me of Nell Dunn.

Anyway, this is beside the point. This is a delicately sad and sweet story about someone who leaves her lover so that she might be cured of cancer. Then she regrets it and spends a lot of time trying to find her again. And so on.

4/5

47.Babel Tower, by AS Byatt

Oh, what to say about this very big, dense book. I enjoyed it, but there were bits that I had to read more lightly than others. Yes, dear reader, sometimes I skim the lengthy passages about snails. They are too much for me.

The moral of this story is that little boys should not be sent away to school; AS Byatt finds a complex and fascinating way of telling it, and despite the fact that some of it is rather predictable, this is forgiveable in the pursuit of realism. Also interesting to note is that very few of the characters are entirely likeable, and yet you still root for the right ones.

For future reference, it should be noted that this is part three in a quartet, and I have not yet read part two. Fool that I am.

3/5

I occasionally read a blog written by an english teacher. A teacher of english language and literature, that would be; not a teacher who is english. Although I’m fairly sure that he is, in fact, some sort of Brit.

I am constantly horrified by the standard of language that he uses. I have seen basic spelling errors, poorly constructed sentences, and incorrect use of punctuation [sez me, the Semi-Colon Queen].

This week he has written a poem. It is appalling. What is the world coming to? Surely an english teacher would at least be aware that such a shockingly bad piece of literature should not be allowed to see the light of day. What if some impressionable child reads it?