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.