Poos Your Own Adventure

1. 

It is four in the morning. You are in the bathroom.

In front of you is a baby change table, complete with a fresh towel, some baby wipes and some soothing cream.

You are carrying your baby. She is wearing a babygro and has a full nappy.

What do you do?

Put her down on the table, undress her and take off her nappy, then put her in a new one (Go to 4)
Put her down on the table and wait a moment, checking you have everything (Go to 3)
Give her to mummy (Go to 2)

2. 

Mummy has gone back to sleep and snarls at you when you attempt to thrust a damp baby at her. You barely escape with your life.

Return to 1 and choose another option.

3. 

You put the baby on the table. She wriggles around a bit and then makes a lot of grunting noises. Her nappy doubles in size.

You take the time to realize that there is no clean nappy on the change table, so you fetch one from the shelf. Note it on your character sheet.

Now what?

Take off the babygro and remove the nappy (go to 5)
Take off the babygro, loosen the nappy and inspect the damage (go to 7)

4. 

You have fallen prey to a classic baby trick - she's been waiting for this opportunity.

As soon as the babygro and nappy are off, the baby squirts poo in all directions like an uncontrolled firehose. You didn't remember to get a clean nappy ready, so you have no protection against it.

Now everything is covered in poo - baby, cleaning table, babygro, Daddy, floor and ceiling.

You have failed and are a poor father. Try again.

5. 

Are you wearing good clothes?

If so, go to 8
If not, go to 9

6. 

Baby fights your attempts to replace the nappy with all her might. She also screams like a branded banshee. You are so overwhelmed by her fury that you fail to prevent her kicking the dirty nappy open with one foot, covering it with poo which she promptly transfers to your arms and stomach. You are too tired to care.

On returning to bed with your clean baby, you transfer the poo to your wife.

Lose 2 sanity points and spend the rest of the night on the couch.

7. 

There is a lot of poo here. It is yellow and resembles cottage cheese.

Do you

Go and check on the internet to make sure this is normal? (Go to 10)
Scrape as much poo off with the old nappy as possible, then finish the job with babywipes? (Go to 11)

8. 

I don't believe you, you're a new father. Where did these good clothes come from at 0400? But let's give you the benefit of the doubt.

The nappy is full of poo. Before you can do anything about this, the baby cocks her pelvis at you and launches a healthy jet of wee over your chest.

Cross your good clothes off your character sheet. Nevertheless, you are in a good place to clean the baby and put a fresh nappy on.

To do this, go to 12
To do something else, go to 11

9. 

Your baby dislikes your dirty t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, and expresses this dislike through the medium of urine. You are now wet.

Regardless, you focus on changing the baby's nappy. Do you put on some soothing cream first (go to 11) or just go straight for the fresh nappy (go to 6)?

10. 

You do what? Why are you even a father? What are you thinking? You leave your baby alone in the bathroom to go on the internet? For real?

Okay, it's fine. The baby manages to call child services before anything serious happens. The judge sends you to a Siberian salt mine, where you can't do as much damage you monster.

11.

The soothing cream has the smell of a wet sheep and the consistency of tar. Because it is 0400, your manual dexterity is too limited to cope with the thick gunk and the tiny screw lid that keeps it in the tube.

As you struggle with it, your wet clothes cause you to slip on the slick bathroom floor. You crack your head on the sink on the way down.

Your wife discovers you some hours later, wee-stained and barely rational, at the feet of your baby. As the baby is clean and dry and your wife's sleep was not further disturbed, congratulations! You are an excellent father after all, even with your ammoniac stench and a concussion.

12.

At last! The baby is in a clean, new nappy and the damage to the bathroom is minimal.

Wait for around two hours and return to 1. 

Lullaby

The only good thing I can think of about being stuck in the hospital when your baby isn't all that well is that you can't get on the internet and scare yourself stupid with forum posts.

'I did X to my baby and now he's officially brain damaged! :)'
'Dont want to scare you hun but we had that and fifteen minutes later my husband was arrested for murder!'
'IMHO all mothers who think like that are not fit and oughtn't not to have babys'
The top 15 signs YOUR baby is about to explode, No.1 - a picture of Angelina Jolie Breastfeeding!'

Freja has a touch of jaundice, so she's got a brilliant instant tan. It's because she's premature, her liver wasn't quite ready to deal with the sudden demands of breathing and blood cells and all this work and stress dear god. I know how her liver feels.

It's not serious. If it was serious, which it isn't, we're in a hospital where they know how to deal with it (a sunlamp, amazingly) and it soon wouldn't be serious. Seriously, stop worrying about it and try and get some sleep. I'm serious, it really isn't a serious problem.

But what if it is?

It all gets a bit much for me. My wife has a fond memory of a pair of midwives coming in to weigh Freja (who is relentlessly gaining weight despite her striking colour) and measure her bilirubin. As they took Freja, I was crooning tunelessly to keep her reassured. I'd been doing this for some hours. It seemed like the right thing to do.

Wife and midwives exchanged glances at this point, because I was actually on the other side of the room to the baby, walking in erratic circles. I missed their looks, I was trying to think of a rhyme to 'Daddy's going to sing you a lullaby.' 'And if this lullaby won't work, Daddy's going to sleep on the psyche ward,' for example.

"Oj, poppa sjunger," ('Ah, Daddy's singing') one midwife said, wisely. I believe I nodded, satisfied that I was being a good Dad. Nobody tried to stop me, which is just as well, as I think that tenuously-held tune was just about the only thread keeping my mind intact by then. I carried on singing pseudorhymes unabated throughout the consultation.

Everything just seemed too much worry, beyond staying still in the little hospital room and enjoying time with my family (until the psychiatric team were properly notified, at least). Taking her for her first walk round the snowy hospital grounds reduced me to a whimpering wreck. All those 'what if' questions that have no answers. What if it's serious? What if she gets too cold? What if an eagle swoops down and carries her off? Does the insurance cover eagles? We have to call them! Now! Hello, is that Eagle Insurance? Take all our money!

We were actually sent home after two more days. Although her bilirubin is up a little, and although we have to go back to the hospital for daily tests, she's perfectly happy, she's doing very well indeed. Going home for the first time was wonderful. We used the new cot and blankets and ate sushi for the first time in ages and relaxed just a tiny bit.

Then I went on the internet, of course, and totally ruined any peace of mind I've ever had. So it all balanced out.

'How one newborn baby gained super-white teeth by following this weird old tip the doctors don't want you to know!'

Skin Flick

'Hud mot hud' is the Swedish phrase for 'skin against skin'. It's everywhere in the ward. The midwives say it at least once in every visit. It's on posters or stickers on nine out of ten walls. And they have a nightly viewing of a training video that flashes it up on banner titles every couple of seconds, along with a recording of Beethoven's Ninth and free eye clamps.

I watched the rest of the video as I shambled through the ward kitchen, collecting crispbread and cucumber for a late snack. After a lot of footage of smiling babies sucking painlessly and a nurse pinching a hideous plastic ball with a nipple, the next banner headline was 'Pappans Roll' - Daddy's Role.

There was no narrative to this section. It was footage of a weary looking fellow in a black T-shirt, carrying heaving shopping bags up a hill. Then he took out some trash, chopped some fruit up for his wife, changed a nappy, did the hoovering and sat on the sofa, taking his T-shirt off so baby could get that vital hud-to-hud nap.

An exhausted, half-naked man doing endless housework? You're not going out of your way to sell this, are you? No wonder all the dads in here look so George A. Romero. Not, of course, that seeing an elderly midwife with pointed fingers crushing that flesh-coloured bulb repeatedly does much to sell motherhood. I'm sure the thoughts behind it are all good, though.

Freja has turned yellow.

Baby Food

The ward we stayed on was good, really. Full of zombie-like new parents shuffling round the corridors, peering blearily into their blanketed bundles or sitting in happy family groups just outside in the visiting area.

Nice hospital, shame about the food. My wife has hers included, I don't - I'm on a fold-out bed on the other side of the room, feeling rather like an optional extra. It's like being on tour in an American hotel again, eating out of corner shops and vending machines. Not that I'm losing out - Spanish Fish Gratin? Taco meat stew? Inventive ideas, I'm sure, but they all look like processed liver and taste like someone's mixed their entire spice rack with dirty water then tipped it over dogmeat.

Whilst I snack on hotdogs or microwave stir-fries, Freja snacks on her mother. It's a very mixed feeling, seeing my daughter happy and content under her cotton blanket, chewing away on my agonised wife. She's being brilliant with it, smiling at Freja when being watched, but mouthing obscenities and trying not to contort off the bed the rest of the time.

Last week, someone told us about a Victorian nipple protecter they saw in an antique shop. It was made of silver, an ornate piece with curly holes like a gothic colander. At the time, armouring your boobs against your baby's onslaught seemed a little over the top to me. Now, I'm not so sure.

Freja is a little early. We weren't expecting her until early February, so she's about two or three weeks before time. So we're staying here for the rest of the week, just so that the midwives can keep an eye on her and check nothing untoward occurs.

They're a formidable lot, these Swedish midwives. Dark blue uniforms, some pretty firmly held beliefs and tightly-scheduled appearances. We meet about two new ones every day, and each one has some new observation or rule to pass over. Don't let her suck your finger, not even to keep her quiet, she'll become too exhausted to eat. Only use baby oil for baths. Why have you put her in a babygro? Skin to skin contact is so important! Why aren't you feeling guiltier about everything you're doing wrong?

All this is reinforced by a huge red bible of advice, teaching you how to do manual expression or feed baby with a spoon. There are two pages for Dads, followed immediately by two for homosexual couples. Right on, Sweden.

Birthday Part 3

Stage 3 - The Actual Giving Birth Bit

Some time later, Freja Mary Kristina turned up, weighing 3640g and measuring 50cm long. That's 8.02 lbs and 19.7 inches in pounds and pence. We used up a total of four midwives, who were all brilliant but are now discarded husks littering the ward.

During the process, I learnt some new words. My favourite is lustgas, laughing gas, which sounds like it's going to be even more fun than usual in Swedish. I tried some when the midwives were out of the room. Made me feel like I was being Hunter S Thompson, which says a lot about what a middle-class Guardian reader I am. There was actually a point in the pregnancy where Tristan was a serious contender for boys' names, come to think of it.

Some of the other words might have been swear words. I need to look them up and check, I'm not sure.

My wife did us all proud, though, she was very strong and determined after a pretty long haul. 66 hours in total, I make it, from waters breaking to finished product. Of all the racing emotions, tiredness and hunger were near the top. All the same, as Freja emerged and turned from blue to pink, Veronica instantly went from exhausted pain to total joy. Almost as quickly as I started crying, in fact.

So after a lot of excitement, panic, pain, amazement, hard work, worry and joy, we now have our wonderful daughter. If we can just go through some combination of that every day for the rest of our lives, we'll be excellent parents.

Birthday part 2

Stage 2 - Water Hobbits

Bless us and splash us, my preciousses, but I'm a big nerd. I think this is a well-known and widely-commented-on fact. I've come to terms with it over time, that passion for a subject is no protection from mockery.

It's a particularly favourite thing for my family to tease/bully me about. They recently found it very funny that I was talking excitedly about our new åkpåse, the Swedish word for a baby-carrying bag. You pronounce it a bit like 'Ork Poser'. That's their new name for me. Great.

Anyway, after two days of early labour pains, my wife was getting a bit of a sore back, and the midwife recommended a warm bath. Worked wonders, so much so that she didn't really want to get out of it for six hours or so. For much of that time, she was listening to the soundtrack from the Peter Jackson (too long, too much CGI, this isn't the place for a review, shut up about it) film.

And I just know that my family are going to tease me rigid about this, but it was my wife's choice and nobody is ever going to believe me.

Birthday part 1

My understanding is that there are three stages to labour in Sweden. It's an understanding based on personal experience, perhaps, but no less valid for all that.

Stage 1 - Crisps and Ice Cream

You get to stay at home for this bit, mostly, occasionally popping over to the midwife to check that everything's going well. Although it's maybe a little nerve-wracking, the two biggest problems during this stage are feeling bored and running out of comfort food.

Between the water breaking and the offical verdict that we'd moved on a stage, we managed 48 hours of this. Towards the end, we went back to the hospital and decided that actually, going back and forth all the time was a bit too tiring so we'd just stay put. We'd eaten all the ice cream by this point, so there was nothing worth going back for anyway.

Monsterous

It's okay, I'm the monster here, we haven't given birth to one. Not yet, anyway.

My wife is still in the throes of the early stages. Contractions all through the night, increasingly painful, but nowhere near regular enough that the hospital will accept her as a card-carrying birth-giver.

On the other hand, I'm clearly a monster because I had one of the best nights of sleep I've had in a long time. Other than my innate callousness, a few things contributed to this. Fresh sheets (I changed them before we left yesterday), being very tired and best of all, not sleeping in the snow.

Her body temperature has been up during the pregnancy, so that we slept with the windows open at all times, even to the extent of waking up in a Stockholm hotel with an inch of snow on the floor. But now she's feeling the cold again, as welll as feeling cooler. We both noticed it. Once I'd noticed it, I went to sleep immediately.

Neither of us have had many good nights of sleep for a while, I guess. That's likely to continue, of course, so I'll take what I can get, thanks.

It may be a girl.

We've been fairly sure it's going to be a boy for a while. This was based on a scientific process involving the size and shape of the bump and the sprinkling of a decoction of moonbeams around an orchard at midnight. One of the midwives yesterday referred to the scan as a she in very definite terms, and tried to take it back in a defensive burst including claiming we'd called it she first and she'd assumed we'd already known and gosh, look at the time, I think someone's calling me next door. So the cat may be out of the bag on that one.

The baby's still in the bag, though. My wife says today, for sure, no way will she put up with another 24 hours of this. We'll see what the midwives say today, we're going back in for another check-up.

Latency Period

Quiet afternoon, really.

I've spent the last few weeks in a funk, mostly sitting in front of the computer either writing or playing games. Tuned out, really, for two reasons. Partly because having a highly-strung husband sawing at his nerves in your ear is unlikely to help keep a wife calm. Also, more selfishly, because I'm not going to have the luxury of sitting in front of a computer, piano, painting desk or other hobby area quite so much in the years ahead.

Keep walking round, the midwife said. Advice passed on by my mother, as well, who used to teach NCT classes. And my mother in law, who's a midwife herself. But we've been sitting in front of the telly, dozing. Does that predispose you to sudden infections? Or a prolongued labour? Shouldn't we be eating heavily spiced food or having very athletic sex? Not because we'd enjoy it, obviously, purely for obstetric reasons.

I had a quick dash out to a local baby clothes shop, who called to say a special pillow we'd ordered had arrived. It has supportive foam that prevents your newborn's fontanelles from fusing into a flat plate, or something. And cute little bear ears, which I suspect may be the main reason we're buying it. It was a dash because I didn't want to leave my wife at home without someone to fetch/carry/prod her anxiously and ask her how she's doing every five minutes.

But the shop was shut, so I dashed home again. It's very cold and dark today. Well, it's winter. Saying it's dark basically means it's not the fifteen minutes on either side of noon when the sun's remote glow can be seen, shimmering rosily behind the lips of the nearby hills. There's also a light dusting of powdery snow. I like snow, it feels like a good omen.

If something doesn't happen fairly soon, I'm going to start poking her with a chili, see if that helps. That's not a euphemism, by the way, I mean something like a scotch bonnet. Actually, that's not helping, I think I'll just abandon this while I'm behind.

What do you mean, not yet?

When we left the flat this morning, I had a distinct moment of thinking 'next time we're here, it'll be a family home.' Which proves the danger of sentimental thinking - it is one already, apart from anything else. And here the three of us are, back again, the youngest still tucked inside like a Russian doll.

"My water broke," my wife told the midwife. She got a sceptical look in return.

"I need to look and see," the midwife said. "Then we can confirm you're in labour."

My wife did some private muttering shortly after, to the tune of 'if you're going to tell me my water hasn't broken and these aren't labour pains, I'm going to drive you through the nearest wall with the power of my naked hands.' Words to that effect, at least.

All was well, though. So this is officially the first stage of labour, latensfasen i Svensk, rather than my pre-emptive call this morning. She had a lot of light cramps last night, along with a strange scrabbling sensation from the baby, rather as if it were trying to tunnel out like a dog. This morning, as the scrabbling turned into more recognisable crampy pains, she had a strange look in her eye. A look that said 'is this it? is this all they've been complaining about? Hah! Wusses, all of them.'

No such luck, obviously. They were longer and even crampier by the time we left the hospital, but both the midwives we saw had nodded sagely and told her to expect them to get worse. "You can come back when they're more painful," one of them said. She paused significantly. "A lot more painful."

So we're back home for now, with a checklist of symptoms (both normal and emergency) that would count as a Get Into The Delivery Room Free card. At some point in the next couple of days, we will have a baby. The instruction is to sleep as much as possible. Because we won't for the next few years.

Hanging by a Cord

It's funny - after nine months, it's actually starting to feel that having a pregnant wife is normal.

Things catch up with you at odd moments. I've stopped fussing round in a nervous panic if she tries to pick up things from the floor or change light bulbs. She's stopped trying to do both those things with quite as much adamantine independence as she usually would, she calls for me now. I don't find it funny to help her on with her shoes. Actually, it feels like good practice for whoever is coming out of her in the weeks to come.

Several people have said to me that the last month can be quite tough. The midwife drew a helpful graph that approximated the couple's feelings over the nine months. The female version was a sine wave. Low for the first trimester when everythings all nauseous, high for the second when your body catches up a bit, low and tense for the last one when the bump overtakes your body again and everything gets terribly imminent.

Men, according to this graph, are all happy for the first trimester. It's not happening to them, after all, and you can be all macho and supportive and pat her back while she vomits and enjoy telling everyone. Assuming you've not instantly done a terrified runner, of course. The big mood swing comes later, when some kind of reality kicks in and the swelling evidence is more clearly apparent.

Not sure I totally bought it - I've not had a big mood swing - but graph and friendly anecdotes both say the last month is tough for everyone. It's a hard feeling to pick a word for, the feeling of something this imminent. Exciting and also terrifying and also completely unpredictable. A big old Foetus of Damocles, complete with tiny fingernails engraved on the hilt, hanging over both of us now. If feotus is even the right word anymore, it's maybe grown out of that already.

Fraught. That's a word. It'll do.

This Just In/Out

The water broke this morning, about an hour and a half ago.

My wife had been wondering if she'd be able to tell when it broke. That's a thing, apparently, some people have very little. It wasn't our thing, in the event. It wasn't exactly a flood, but we'd turned the bed into a sort of improvised ark using special waterproof sheeting just in case. And just as well.

0545 on 12/01/13 marks the beginning of the first phase of labour, then. She's curled up on the sofa now, timing contractions with a stopwatch. We've just had a very relaxed, almost Edwardian breakfast. The hospital knows, and is expecting us for a scan later this morning.

The journalistic side of me wants to record impressions of how I'm feeling, what we're both thinking right now, what's happening. Not much on all counts, really. I asked my wife if there was anything she wanted to say for the record (because I'm a jerk that way) - "No. Not at the moment."

Same here. Too many hopes and fears to sort out into anything neat or tidy. More later on, as or when, who can tell.

Pregnancy With Dummies

We had our first parenting class a few days ago.

Our midwife was a quietly spoken woman who's Swedish was mostly a bit fast for me. I followed the gist of what she said, most of the time, but it was hard work. I kept tuning out, my poor old brain trying to decode the previous sentence as the next three or four rolled by.

Much of the time, I was hypnotised by what she was doing with her hands.

Early on, she picked up a stuffed baby. It was a pretty hideous bendy ragdoll thing with a unisex beige body, an eerily staring plastic head and the most amazing knitted umbilical cord. This last was a full-scale replica of the real thing, with blue and red blood vessels spiralling along it in bright colours. It looked like an Oxbridge scarf had been clumsily attached to the newborn by some nearsighted but collegiate-minded professor.

Once she picked it up, she didn't put it down.

It did all sorts. It dived and twirled through a plastic pelvis. It cradled itself under her neck and against her bosum. It swam about and contorted against her belly to show us its preferred positions, pre-birth. All of this was during active demonstrations, of course. What was really fascinating was what she did with it the rest of the time, when she'd sort of forgotten she was holding it.

Did you know you can play a baby like a concertina? I didn't, but I'm going to have to assume that's what she was explaining. You can also keep it snug and warm by rolling it into a little ball and tucking it under one arm. And if you're having trouble carrying junior, why not try this nifty trick - tie the cord round its wrists and ankles, and carry it like a bowling ball bag!

This was all before she brought out the plushy placenta, which was a violet jellyfish-looking thing with net membranes. That has supplanted the leering face of David Cameron enjoying the latest round of benefit cuts in my nightmares, as of tonight. My midnight welfare state is going to be axed by a furry neon afterbirth.

The class was pretty good, though, calm, reassuring and informative in equal measures. The bits I understood, anyway. This is Sweden, so the first thing we discussed was who was bringing the fikabröd for next week's class. Fikabröd is a generic term for bakery goods eaten with coffee, and along with coffee breaks, is a national obsession. You want to know how long it takes the baby to show up after your water breaks? After the coffee break, that's when.

Ask Ripley

"It's a very strange feeling, having a little alien moving around inside of you," my wife said just now.

I can't really imagine it, to be honest. I remember having a colonoscopy once. The irritatingly butch and public-schooly surgeon convinced me that taking a sedative for the process was basically for wimps. Wimps who would clutter up his outpatient facility with their drugged-up and nurse-time-consuming rantings, so I did what he implied the decent thing was and went without.

His other wonderful bit of preparatory explanation was to explain the application of scope lubricant with the phrase 'I'm just going to grease up the old tyre.'

It was a pretty unpleasant experience, frankly. I could distinctly feel the weird coilings of my own guts as Johnny Eton shoved his lengths of cable up it, and the distant but still sharp pinch of the biopsy being taken was surprisingly painful.

Something like that, that's how I imagine pregnancy might feel. If we were still in the UK, I'd be willing to believe that having a bunch of smug and privileged (if very well trained and highly competent) medical staff being condescending to you would probably add to your woes.

My wife is clearly having the most direct experience of this tiny alien. If she's on the outside of it's unknowable moods and movements, I'm on the outside of her, observing from an even greater remove. I can see it's a massive thing in terms of the impact on her life, mind and body, of course. Somehow I was expecting that more than I was expecting the impact on me.

I trained as a doctor. If I was still a doctor, I'd almost certainly be a smug, privileged, condescending one. Avoiding that likely fate was one reason I left the profession. Another was that they teach you to look at the impact of illness on the patient more than the impact of patients on you. Which is the right way to teach doctors, in all honesty. You want your doctors better able to deal with your ailment than their own crashing depression and alcoholism. Maybe that's cruel in terms of medic welfare, but it's perfectly fair from my point of view. They get paid heaps to deal with my lumpy face or prolapsing bottom. I don't.

Anyhoo. Whatever is left of my medical instinct had prepped me to expect a lot of the physiological changes in my wife. Even to be able to explain or predict them before they arrived, or reassure her as they did. Usually after a quick wikipedia-based refresher course, certainly, it's seven years since I practised and I never did obs and gynae past the student level. But I'm pretty sure wikipedia is what my GP had on his computer screen six appointments out of seven, so that's okay.

What this has since taught me is that knowing what to expect is not remotely the same as dealing with it. Not for me, not for her, probably not for anyone else in the history of anything.

My wife is usually right about things, she's a sensible and practical woman. I'm usually wrong about things, or at least confused and vague and prone to wild flights of imagination and creatively adapted memories that back my bizarre opinions up. As she was when she insisted that I was looking in the wrong coat for my gloves, I'd put them in the drawer earlier, even though I was sure I hadn't despite already checking in the coat pockets four times, she is right again about this.

Pregnancy is a very strange feeling, for both of us.

Background Info

This is going to be a blog about having a baby. It's also going to be about living in Sweden.

It's also going to be about being an immigrant, specifically one in Sweden who's wife is about to have a baby.

I'm English, I moved to Sweden about six months ago. When we arrived, neither of us had jobs to go to and I spoke no functional Swedish beyond hello, goodbye and The Horse is Eating A Carrot, courtesy of Rosetta Stone.

We'd planned on moving for some time, my wife is Swedish and was keen to escape the self-perpetuating financial nightmare of Recession Britain. We discovered we were pregnant one month before the move.

This is our story.

(cue moody music and sweeping opening credit sequence, probably something by Coldplay or Radiohead. 

Over this plays footage of us landing in Sweden. 

We're driving up and down inside a bleak freight terminal dock in Göteborg. It's early dawn. Everything is either grey, warning-sign red or an alcoholic dockhand looking for a good time. We're looking for the way out. 

After driving up and down the same stretch of what proves to be a poorly-signposted railway line for some time, we end up stuck in front of an unyielding barrier. My wife goes and finds an efficient man in a hardhat. He explains only lorries can leave by this exit and wonders how we got there. I wave at him cheerfully from the window. He nods to her sympathetically and gives her directions.

Meanwhile, an queue of impatient truck drivers with terrifying Scandinavian facial hair is forming behind our van. Bewildered and sweating with that very British horror of having mildly inconvenienced some total strangers, I make a perfect eleven point-turn and take us back the way we came.

Some time later, we manage to find the exit and escape. 

I hope this arrival is in no way an omen for our forthcoming childbirth.)