The life-changing alternative to a romantic Valentine's dinner

I am sure that when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully, just as Dr Johnson observed.
Though the regrettable abolition of capital punishment in the UK, even for treason, piracy and arson in Her Majesty’s dockyards, sadly prevents me from putting his theory to a practical test.

However, I know from personal experience that there comes a tipping point when any prediction of lifespan stops offering reassurance and becomes a threat.

When I was a small boy a gypsy lady knocked on our door selling clothes pegs and lucky heather. I cannot imagine that my mother departed from the habit of a lifetime by actually buying anything, but the encounter ended with the gypsy grabbing my mother’s hand and assuring her that she was a lovely lady who would live to be 82.

An image of a gipsy fortune teller has been removed to avoid potential charges (financial, not criminal) from the money-grubbing image copyright police.

Mum was initially cheered by this, because her parents had died aged 60 and 63. But when she reached 80, and particularly 81, it became the source of increasing concern. It concentrated her mind all right, though not on anything positive.

Spookily, or self-fulfillingly, 20 years ago last month the prophecy proved absolutely correct.

Demonstrating that good old-fashioned Romany fortune-tellers are a great deal more reliable than the Internet, which forecast that I would be handing in my dinner pail last Saturday.

A last outing for this dear old favourite, now sadly abandoned as my Twitter avatar

True, I always knew that I could buy myself an extra 30 years of life by simply switching my tick from the “pessimistic” box to “optimistic”. But how could someone who has been “a glass three quarters empty – and with a really nasty-looking foreign object at the bottom” man all his life be expected to tell such a thumping lie?

I kept telling myself that it was all a bit of harmless fun until I developed a mysterious lump on my jaw last month, and was referred for various hospital tests. This convinced me that I was indeed on the way out. However, I prudently confined myself to betting my wife £50 that I was dying, rather than squandering my life savings, giving away all my belongings or commissioning a fine memorial.

A number of people diagnosed with terminal cancer have famously gone down the latter route, only to find themselves trying to sue their local health authority for compensation when it later turned out that they were not dying after all.

I'm not making it up: one disgruntled man who was wrongly diagnosed with terminal cancer

I guessed I was in the clear when the lump miraculously vanished shortly before its scheduled biopsy. So now I am embracing life with a new spring in my step, while ever conscious that Fate is probably waiting just around the corner, toying with a sock full of wet sand.

Perhaps in the shape of the 100% increase in my complement of sons, expected a week today.

My last column was sadly misinformed in believing that our Wednesdays-only breech baby turnaround expert was a bloke, and that he achieved success in 60% of cases. In fact we saw a charming lady, who cheerily admitted to a success rate of just 40%, which the determinedly stubborn Jamie Hann swiftly pushed towards 39%.

So Mrs Hann followed medical advice and booked herself a Caesarean section, much against her inclinations. Which at least allowed us to choose the date of the birth. I lobbied strongly for February 29, so that we would only have to buy him a birthday present every fourth year, but apparently he cannot be kept waiting that long.

The hospital recommended February 13, but Mrs Hann superstitiously demurred. And so we ended up with a scheduled delivery on Valentine’s Day. This will save me from buying a romantic dinner not only in 2012 but every year for the rest of my life, since no doubt we will be hosting a kiddies’ birthday party instead.

No more Valentine's Day dinners: such a blow

Already my newly extended life is looking up very nicely.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Pregnancy: on the whole, I am glad to be a bloke

Unexpected discoveries on the brink of old age include this: being pregnant with a breech baby is very like voting in a British General Election.

Despite appearances, I am not pregnant myself; but my wife unmistakably is. And our baby, due in February, is resolutely refusing to adopt the approved position for a conventional delivery, despite increasingly voluble encouragement to do so.

Mrs Hann reckons that this can only be because he is stubborn to the point of self-defeating bloody-mindedness, like his elder brother. I am genuinely unaware of anything in their genetic inheritance that could account for this profound flaw in their characters.

A small boy reluctantly obeying instructions he does not agree with

In case you are wondering, the similarity to voting in a General Election is that medics keep outlining various ways of dealing with the problem, and my wife’s reaction is the same as mine when confronted with a ballot paper: she does not fancy any of the above one little bit.

Whether that be performing origami on her womb before delivery, extracting the baby by Caesarean section or simply allowing nature to take its course (with special emphasis on how they would respond if the infant got stuck on his way out, as breech babies are apparently more prone to do).

Sadly, Mrs Hann does not have the option of spoiling her ballot paper and walking out of the polling station in disgust. One way or another, a decision has to be made quite soon on how to bring young Jamie into the world.

So tomorrow we are going to hospital for our consultant’s Plan A: attempting to turn the baby around inside his mother.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy: what could possibly go wrong?

This comes with plenty of caveats. It will be painful. It may distress the baby or damage the placenta. It could even induce premature labour and require an emergency Caesarean section. Best of all, even if it is successful, there is every chance that the baby could simply turn straight back round again. Particularly, I suppose, if he has already shown form as an awkward little so-and-so.

Luckily the doctor was quick to set my wife’s mind at rest when she said that she had read that the chances of this happening were as high as 50%.

“No, no, it’s much closer to 40%”, came the confident reply, as though that made it pretty much a dead cert.

The baby is scheduled to be induced before full term in any case, because Mrs Hann has gestational diabetes, and this happy event has already been pencilled in for Friday week.

I saw the light bulb clicking on above my wife’s head.

“Here’s an idea,” she said. “Why don’t you just wait until you are ready to deliver him anyway, and try to turn him around then?”

“Oh no, we can’t do that.”

“Why?”

“Er, logistical reasons.”

“Such as?”

“The bloke who knows how to turn babies around only comes in on Wednesdays.”

So are the great life-and-death decisions of our wonderful health service arrived at. For some reason my mind wandered off at this point to that South African hospital where unexplained deaths in the intensive care unit turned out to due to a cleaner disconnecting the life support machine to plug in her vacuum cleaner. Though that is probably an urban myth, as most good stories turn out to be.

I do not know why women willingly put themselves through all this, and I certainly do not know why so many of them volunteer to do it more than once. Particularly in our case, when I kept leaving all those magazine articles about happy only children so prominently lying around, and even made one the home page of our computer.

All I can do is hold my wife’s hand, smile reassuringly and think, as I so often do when I run into the participants in elections: “Rather you than me.”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.