Pregnancy, Baby & You Magazine

The new issue of Pregnancy, Baby & You mag is out now (their website is at www.thinkbaby.co.uk). My next column appears in the April issue, but for those of you who missed the mag last month (shame on you!), here's my January 2008 column:


Are you sitting comfortably reading this at home? Yes? Then stop. Stop immediately. Fold up this mag, tuck it into your coat pocket and head for your local.

Done that? What do you mean you’re embarrassed reading PB&Y in the pub? Okay, tuck it inside a copy of Nuts, then. Got a pint? Best get a shot, too. You’re going to need it. Because, my friend, your pub days are over.

Pub culture is dying. We’re getting healthier, snuffing out fags, cutting out booze. But you are playing a part too. Yes, dear reader, you.

“Not me,” I hear you mutter, “I’d never help the patron saint of coffee – St Arbucks – convert my beloved local.” I said that, too. Once. But like some St Peter of Booze, by your partner’s third cry of “Epidural!” you will have denied the pub at least three times.

Naturally, you will have celebrated the news of your imminent arrival in the pub. Most important events of your life have probably been celebrated in the pub – if they haven’t actually occurred there in the first place. Excluding, I’m hoping, conception.

Your first denial, however, is already in the post in the shape of Provider Panic. It arrives at the moment when you find your Lotto fantasy no longer features a new Maserati but a Bugaboo with on-board i-Pod and climate control. That’s the moment when you suddenly realise that baby stuff costs money. And if babies love anything, boy do they love stuff. Prams, cots, sterilisers. All this and stuff you’ve never even heard of before: topping and tailing bowl (£39.99) anyone?

Thanks to PP you will cancel all mag subscriptions (apart from PB&Y, natch), start taking sandwiches to work and – shock horror – ditch the pub. You are now an embryonic Responsible Parent, my son. And this will delight your partner. Until, having cleaned up your own act, you start lecturing her on the dangers of half-a-glass of red wine with Christmas dinner. Then she will just wish you’d piss off back to the pub where you belong. She may even tell you this. (A word of advice, here: Don’t put it down to hormones. You really are being a sanctimonious pain in the arse.)

In the meantime Champions’ League nights in the pub will slip by, all denied with increasingly flimsy mendacity (“Sorry, bad night: I’m bare-knuckle cage fighting with Jeremy Clarkson.”). And on it will go until the major pub-based event of your life hoves into view. The Wetting of the Baby’s Head.

Why on earth, you might ask, would I miss out on a legitimised, tradition-sanctioned, recrimination-free night on the lash? Am I mad? Well, it’s a kind of madness, I suppose. It involves gazing at your firstborn for hours on end, marvelling at her unique ability to utter the word “Ak” and make green pooh. She is clearly a child prodigy.

This might not sound like good news. But just think of it like this: which event would you rather relive? Your stag night or your wedding night? It’s a no-brainer, really. Unless, of course, you married Tracy Barlow out of Corrie.