Strange nights spent away from where you normally sleep (usually no beds involved)

[Balderdasha]

Summer 2014: the wedding of my best friend from age 9-11 years old. Due to my propensity for leaving hotel bookings to the last minute, and also my terrible geography, we ended up in a hotel 17 miles down the coast from the wedding venue, and we don't drive.

I was giving a reading at the wedding, the lovely one about two tree roots becoming intertwined. My husband jiggled our daughter in the baby Bjorn carrier at a discreet distance to stop her screaming at the delay to her feed. After the ceremony, things were more relaxed. My daughter sat on the lawn, a muslin draped around her frou-frou dress in a vain attempt to protect it, contentedly eating fistfuls of Eton mess out of a bowl. Later on we changed her into her pyjamas and walked her around the grounds in her pushchair and, miraculously, she fell asleep. We stayed out for a couple more hours, having a very rare tipple, and then, deciding we were pushing our luck, tried to order a taxi.

Turns out coastal towns late at night are not renowned for having as many taxis as central London. We ended up waiting over an hour, during which time our daughter woke up, cranky and confused. We strapped her into the baby Bjorn again, this time on me, facing outwards, and I took her into the disco room for a fluorescent-lit boogie with the drunken mother-of-the-bride. The total shock stopped her burgeoning cries and, once we eventually got a taxi, she fell asleep again in the car seat, and transferred to her cot at the hotel with relative ease.

My husband has been fairly sceptical about my hotel booking skills ever since.

[Sporting]

Back in 1985 my sister and her husband were staying in a rented flat in Perth Road, London. Paul, then a salesman, also lived there. I visited one night and we had a load of scotch and I fell asleep on the sofa bed. In the morning I awoke to find myself in a different room. Only it wasn't. When I crashed out the three of them had moved out the furniture (table, chairs, wardrobe etc) as well as photos and so on, and replaced all these with a bed, a different table and other photos and assorted bric a brac. The sense of disorientation was really bewildering, I'm sure they had fun doing it...

Years later I met Paul again in more serious circumstances: my brother-in-law's funeral. The story which follows isn't a strange night one but I'll tell it anyway. As I mentioned on another thread he died suddenly at the age of 49. I travelled to the funeral.

This went as well as these things can do: there were loads of people there, some of the kids gave little speeches, one sang a song, my sister gave a very moving speech herself, there were songs, some tears, etc. After there was a reception in a pub with lots of beer, food, chat, etc.

Funny thing happened on the way to the funeral. While the immediate family went in hearses, funeral and other private cars, I was to get a lift from some other guest who would come first, as many did, to my sister's house. My lift turned out to be this old friend of the family, Paul, who I'd met about 25 or more years ago. Now Paul has his finger in many pies, but one of them is that he's a London cab driver, with his own black cab, which he drove up to Suffolk in. Now he didn't know exactly where the crematorium was so Rachel gave him the poscode which he punched into his satnav. Off we went, plenty of time to spare, towards Bury St. Edmonds. Approaching the town, Paul suddenly turned off down a country lane...the sat.nav told him to go that way. After about ten minutes of going down increasingly narrower lanes we came to the opinion that the postcode we'd been given was wrong. So we made our way into Bury and stopped at a pub to ask the way. Outside in the courtyard with a pint each were two middle-aged, fairly burly blokes. "Excuse me," said Paul, "can you tell us where the crematorium is?" One of the men answered, "I dunno where the fucking crematorium is but it's where the fucking stiffs fucking go, innit?!" His mate, seeing we were suited up, told him to pay some respect and that he would do us a map. We went inside to have a quick pint (well, you can't park outside a pub and not go in, can you?).

After about 5 minutes, the drunk agressive bloke came in and said to Paul, "Hey, you've got a fucking taxi, ain't ya? I need a lift!" Paul told him that we had to run a small errand first and then we'd be back to help him out (lying of course). The bloke went out again, we finisthed our pints, and armed now with precise directions wondered how to get to the taxi without the bloke trying to get in as well. on going outside, however, we discovered he'd found a local taxi into which he was getting. They started off, so did we, but about half a minute into our journey we saw the same bloke running down the middle of the road hailing our taxi. He must have lasted all of half a minute in the local cab before the driver had told him to fuck off out of it. Paul slowed down, made sure all the doors were locked, and then as our friend was about to try to open the door, sped off down the road, and towards the crematorium.

After the funeral I went to the reception with my other sister who'd come directly to the crematorium. Paul didn't know where the reception was going to be held so followed a couple of cars on the way out under the assumption that they were going too. Only they weren't going directly; they were teachers from one of the children's schools who had to go back again to work to do some admin stuff or whatever before heading off later to the pub. So Paul's taxi pulled up into the parking area of a primary school with Paul wondering whether it was normal for a pub to be so near such a building.
.

[Sits]

Well it's a shared memory we both still treasure. Thanks Sporting.

[Sporting]

No, that's a nice story. Thanks.

[Sits]

I can't hold a candle to most of this thread but for what it's worth here's the only one which springs to mind from my sheltered existence.

September 1984, the future Mrs. S (just 19) and I (20) took our first holiday together having got engaged a month earlier. We were skint but wanted to go overseas so booked a Eurocamp holiday in Fréjus, with overnight stops in Maçon (on the way) and Reims on the return. It goes without saying I completely underestimated the distances involved as sole driver - even with my youth.

We were in our first "shared" car, a crap but beloved 1979 Triumph Dolomite (see Old Cars Which Still Look Tremendous thread for a pic taken later on this trip). This was long before the tunnel or M25 so just getting from Maidenhead to Dover for a night Sealink was a slog. We landed in Calais some time around 1am and I proceeded (momentarily on the wrong side of the road before remembering) due east into Belgium.

Having corrected this detour, off we headed. This being long before GPS, I had prepared a written route, and Mrs. S' job was to talk me through the roads, towns and villages along the way. We still do this today albeit Mrs. S now uses a map app. My eyesight must have been pretty sharp at 20. Nowadays the idea of driving any distance in the dark gives me the jitters, let alone barrelling along unknown roads in the dark on the wrong side of the road.

When you start falling asleep at the wheel, the problem is that you lose the rationality to realise the danger. Anyway by the time we got to St. Dizier (about 240 miles) it got too much. We pulled over away from the main road, nosing up to a plane tree. Pushed the seats back and crashed.

Not sure what time it was when we were awoken by the sounds of aluminium poles, canvas and polythene sheeting, as we rubbed our eyes to see the town market being built around us. A hurried exit followed by a much needed breakfast and coffee.

Sits: living on the edge.

[Sporting]

Another great story. Funnily enough, I've never attended a stag do in my life: in the wrong place at the wrong time, friends simply not getting married or if they did then forgoing the stag/hen night. What I most certainly would not like to do is have to wear a matching t-shirt and drink ten piña coladas in half an hour in somewhere like Magaluf. However, making bikinis out of tin foil kinda attracts. I wonder if Blue Peter ever did anything similar.

[Balderdasha]

March 2014. I was invited to a hen do somewhere in the Cotswolds. I was exclusively breastfeeding our daughter still, aside from starting her on a few purees, and I hadn't got on well with a breast pump (while I produced loads of milk for our daughter, I could sit there for hours with a breast pump, trying to look at photos of my daughter to stimulate milk production and my body just went, nope, that is not a real baby, we will not be fooled, and shut down production). So the only way to go to the hen do was if my daughter came with me. Coincidentally, my husband was doing some work in Cheltenham the day before, so we all went there overnight and then caught a taxi to the village where the hen do was and rented a room at the nearby pub. I alternated between going to the hen do for a few hours (which was in a rented cottage and involved one game where we made bikinis out of tin foil) and then popping back to the pub to breastfeed my daughter. My husband had the job of entertaining her while I was away.

I left the hen do for the last time around midnight then brought my daughter back for breakfast the next day. She rolled around the carpet while various hungover women cooed at her. My husband then took her for another couple of hours while we went on a country walk, got lost and got chased by a herd of cows. I fed my daughter on my return and then went to order a taxi to the train station. It took a while, I had to phone about six different companies before I found one that was running on a Sunday and by the time I got back my husband had the sort of ashen-faced demeanour that I would associate with someone returning from the Somme. He'd apparently done four nappy changes, two full outfit changes, had to clean the pub floor because of overflow from the changing mat, and had been cursing me the whole time I was gone.

[Balderdasha]

January 2014: we decided to attempt our first date night. Our daughter was five months old. She was a terrible sleeper, but had just about got into a pattern where she would go down at 7pm and maybe sleep three hours until 10pm. My mum had agreed to babysit. We rushed around doing dinner, bath, story and bedtime for our daughter and got her to sleep in her cot. Then we quickly threw on the fanciest clothes we'd worn in months (a dress! heels!) and prepared to leave. As I passed my daughter's bedroom door I said to my husband in a puzzled tone 'why can I hear running water in our daughter's room?' My husband is always much faster than me to respond to emergencies, and knew there was no good reason to hear running water, so he immediately dashed into the bedroom. Boiling, dirty water was streaming through the ceiling, fortunately a foot away from our daughter's cot. My husband grabbed our daughter, who screamed at the indignity of being woken up for the first time in her life. I took thirty seconds of footage of the streaming water on my phone (I knew how crappy our landlord was) and then ran to the flat upstairs.

The guy upstairs was still dressed in his suit from work and looked shell shocked. The boiler had exploded just as he walked into the flat. He was trying to turn the water off but hadn't found the right valve yet.

We spent the rest of the evening / night catching water with buckets and baby baths, moving the sodden mattress out of the way, relocating my daughter's cot to the other bedroom, trying to calm my daughter down.

Date night was, obviously, cancelled. It took us a long time to attempt another one.

[Balderdasha]

2011-2014: when I first met my husband he was already running management training courses, most often in London, but sometimes in other UK or European cities. If he was running a course for two days or more, he'd get hotel accommodation as part of the deal. So, from fairly early on in our relationship we figured out that this was a good way for us to visit places together. I'd arrange to work remotely. We had a two together train card to reduce the travel costs. If the course was close to a weekend, we'd extend the hotel stay by a day or two and go and explore a new city.

We carried on with this pattern after our daughter was born, so she spent quite a lot of her first year being weaned on hotel breakfasts and hanging out in obscure museums.

We visited all the glamorous places: Manchester, Ipswich, Cheltenham, Oxford, the Cotswolds, Birmingham, Nottingham, Cardiff, Vienna. We turned down a trip to Saudi Arabia, my husband did that one on his own.

A few memories of these trips.
- in Cheltenham we were staying near an industrial park on the outskirts. My daughter was learning to crawl so we hung out at a DFS where we could play in the fake sitting rooms.
- at one hotel, we arrived quite late, and the reception had no record of our request for a travel cot. Our daughter was asleep in her pushchair so my husband wasn't worried but I sat on the floor and cried and thought I was a terrible mother. The receptionist found a cot from the hotel next door.
- we once got stranded at a train interchange somewhere. We were laden with heavy bags, tired, our daughter was cranky. I made some sort of throw-away comment that I couldn't imagine how hard it must be for refugees travelling with children, because I was finding this hard enough. My husband misinterpreted it as me being melodramatic. Three generations of his family have actually been refugees, and he just started pointing out that we were in a cafe with armchairs and access to coffee, so we weren't exactly destitute.
- Cardiff was unexpectedly lovely (unexpected purely because I knew nothing before I went. I was completely ignorant). We went a couple of times and enjoyed the museums, the parks, the boat rides, pretending we were in Torchwood, eating in nice restaurants.
- in Vienna I got flu. I had a horrific temperature, was convulsing and shivering. If I had been left on my own in the hotel room to look after our daughter, I don't know how I'd have done it. Coincidentally though, the course my husband was meant to run had been cancelled (and at such short notice that he'd still be paid for it), so he looked after us. We saw very little of Vienna but did make it to the palace near our hotel when I was a little recovered, which had an exhibition of Klimt paintings. At the time, we had a Klimt print in our lounge which we called 'the booby lady' and she was the first image my daughter had smiled or laughed at. Every time we held her up to the print she would break out in beaming grins. It took her another couple of months to smile at a live human being. We found the original of the painting in the Vienna exhibition and took a photo of our daughter with it.

[JVL]

Thanks for that, Sporting - I've never seen those highlights.

Gerald Asamoah, Otto Addo, Dieter Hecking... there were some good players in that 96 team, and some clogging Regionalliga journeymen. I'd forgotten about the red card for Cottbus too!

[Sporting]

[JVL]

Can't hold a candle the number and variety of Balderdasha's tales, which I have thoroughly enjoyed reading in bits and pieces over the last few days, but here goes...

Spring 1996: Got the train down from Leuchars to Cambridge for a friend's birthday party. This turned out to be a very strange affair, things were alternately boring as hell and then totally out of hand, some people got chased out of the flat, I nearly got kicked out, then spent a couple of hours consoling an angry and distraught birthday boy and trying to explain that shit happens sometimes. At some point, I ended up asleep on the concrete floor next to the washing machine. That was not a comfortable place to kip, I woke very early and headed off to the station to start my long and winding journey back north.

June 1997: I was approaching the end of my year as a teaching assistant in Hanover and had been going to watch Hannover 96 regularly throughout the season. A few of the lads in the Abitur class that I had conversation classes with were in the fan club and got tickets for the second leg of the play-off tie against Energie Cottbus, which would decide who got promoted to the 2. Liga. These tickets were like gold dust at the time, 96 had sold out the old Niedersachsenstadion for the first leg (which I also managed to get to, as another teacher had a ticket going spare) and the interest in the second leg was massive. We got the cheapest possible ticket for the journey, changing several times (including a police escort from platform to platform in Berlin) and taking increasingly decrepit regional trains the closer we got to Cottbus. The experience as a whole was pretty horrendous once we arrived: outright hostility from every person we met in Cottbus, police escort to the ground, people throwing stuff from the tower blocks as we were marched to the 'Stadion der Freundschaft' (oh how we laughed at that one), home fans trying to scale the fences around the away sector when the floodlights failed, the snack hut at the back of the terrace being torched as 96 slumped to a 3-1 defeat and then having groups of Cottbus idiots trying to break through the police lines as we were being herded back to the station. We just piled on to the only available train, the fans' special - no tickets, but no-one cared. It took for bloody ever to get back to Hanover and we had to wait for an age in the middle of nowhere for an ambulance that carted someone off to hospital with alcohol poisoning. Didn't get a wink of sleep, walked back to my flat in the Südstadt, showered and changed and then staggered over to the school to sit in the staff room and drink coffee.

March 2001: Bayern v. Arsenal in the Champions League, a few of us got tickets for the match and headed down to Bavaria. We had booked a compartment on a night train back to Karlsruhe but it transpired that Our Man With The Tickets had mislaid them somewhere during the day. We did manage to buy tickets for a later train, but with no reservations – most of the seats were taken and when a couple of us lay down in the corridor between two carriages, the ticket inspectors woke us up and moved us on. Wandered down the train to find the toilet occupied by two lads smoking weed, then gave up on sleep and watched Günzburg, Ulm etc. roll by as morning approached.

June 2003: Went out for a drink with a lady I had been seeing on and off for a few months, to try and establish what the situation was. Went for a bite to eat and ended up in the Schlupfloch in Walldorf, an underground bar in the cellar of one of the building behind the Hauptstraße. No windows, no clock, and no-one ever checked to make sure that it really closed at 3am. We rolled out of there as the sun was coming up, greeted by birdsong and the realization that it was 5:45 on a Friday morning and I had to be in work at 8. Bollocks.

July 2003: SAP football tournament in Rettigheim. We qualified from the group matches during the week and made it to the knockout tournament on Saturday, I think we got to the last 16 before bowing out to the semi-pro players from Walldorf who also worked in HR and Logistics at SAP. The Ireland and UK offices had sent several teams and quite a few supporters over as well, there was live music and at some point the organisers announced that all the remaining beer and wine was now free… when the party finished, there were no cabs to be had and there was no way I fancied the 10km walk home. Two of us ended up asleep in a bus stop in the middle of the village just before dawn, before being woken by a passing taxi driver. “You English? You go Walldorf?” Oh yes. I love you, random taxi man.

[George C.]

What an odd thread.

But fair play, for all these strange tales I suppose.

[Ek weet nie]

Holy moly, that is some story Balderdasha. Well done!

[Balderdasha]

2013: after the wedding but before I gave birth I had too much time on my hands. I was still working a little bit for the bikini company, going to antenatal classes and taking myself swimming, but I was still twiddling my thumbs a lot.

One day, I found an envelope on the underground. It had two first names on the envelope. I opened it up and found a wedding card and £100 cash. I wanted to return it to the rightful owner but didn't have much to go on. The card inside was also signed by two further first names.

As I had so much free time, I launched a full investigation. The givers of the card had slightly unusual first names and I managed to find a wedding blog that featured their wedding which told me their married surname. With that information I found the givers on Facebook. I tried sending the woman a message, but as we weren't friends it went straight to her spam inbox. So I then trawled her Facebook friends list and found two people who were likely to be the recipients of the card (same first names and most recent profile pictures in bride and groom outfits). I would have faced the same difficulty sending them a Facebook message, but I now had the recipients surnames. A further Google search showed that the groom was on a rugby committee somewhere, which mentioned his place of work. That workplace had a very generic email system, firstname.surname@company.com so I sent him an email and waited. I had asked for him to confirm where the card was dropped and who it was from. He replied within the day, very pleased and surprised that I'd been able to track him down, and I sent the card off recorded delivery.

Anyway, that story was not a sleeping in a weird place one, it's just the backdrop to show the type of investigatory skills I was employing at the time. Later that year when I was sitting in the rocking chair with my daughter at all hours of the night, I had to use them for something much more serious.

My daughter was about five weeks old, it was 3am in my red rocking chair in the lounge, and I was flicking through Facebook to stop me falling asleep. A girl I knew from school, but who I hadn't been in touch with that recently, posted a goodbye suicide note on Facebook. It seemed very serious and very final. I felt a huge responsibility to alert the relevant people but I didn't know how to. I ended up waking up my husband to look after our daughter while I employed my spy skills. Through a combination of past Facebook posts, photos, Google maps, street view, etc, I found the girl's address and sent an ambulance to her flat. I managed to find her mum's phone number from the electoral role and inform her. It was all quite stressful and I was having to intermittently breastfeed my daughter as well. The girl had made a suicide attempt, but she survived and went home to stay at her mum's for a bit.

[Nefertiti2]

I really hope you find ways to put all these posts together - a bit like your friend’s bunk bed /desk combo

[Balderdasha]

1988-1991: memory triggered by another thread. My best friend lived on the local council estate and we took it in turns to visit each other's houses each weekend. She loved my house because it never changed. I loved hers for the opposite reason.

My friend's dad was the son of academics, who rejected the very concept of work, and preferred to spend his time painting, doing carpentry or trying to complete the Times crossword. Her mum was from Colombia and always told me it was a very bad country and I should never visit it. My friend had an older brother, a huge Labrador dog, two cats, two budgies (including one called Ringo because of his haircut), a tortoise and multiple rabbits / guinea pigs.

Occasionally the family would come into some money (usually because the dad had been persuaded to do a few shifts at the pizza takeaway, or because the mum had got a bit of work teaching Spanish) and they would use it to decorate the house beautifully, fitted kitchen, three piece sofa suite, everything painted and wallpapered. Then, when they ran out of money the furniture would gradually be sold.

I remember one time, my friend had been able to design her own bedroom and she had it all lime-green and zebra print (remember this is the late 80s / early 90s). She'd had a bunk bed / desk thing put in which I was very envious of. She showed it off to me proudly one weekend and then the next weekend she came to stay at mine. When she got home, her dad had sawn the bunk bed in half and sold the desk to raise funds. She was distraught. The next time she came to stay at mine, her dad sawed off the legs and headboard of her bed, turned it into a cupboard and sold that. She didn't come and stay at mine for a while afterward.

One time, I came round my friend's house and the only furniture left in the lounge was orange crates to sit on, and a ping pong table. The mum and dad were having a weekend long competition to see whose turn it was to have to look for work.

I loved their house because people were always laughing, it was full of pets and I didn't know what I'd find there each time.

[Amor de Cosmos]

I may need to consult to figure out what to do with them.

Chutney

[Hot Pepsi]

I saw this post at the time, but knew it would take a while to write the answer.

The Travis house was owned by an elderly Sicilian man, who had gifted it to his three adult children. The two eldest had proper jobs so they unwisely handed the job of landlording to the youngest son who was unemployed and fancied himself as a rude boy (at some point I will hunt down one of his emails, they are pure comedy).

Anyway, the house had a long narrow back garden and before we moved in, the elderly Sicilian had planted it out as a massive tomato allotment. The terms of our lease said that we must let him in from time to time to tend for and harvest the tomatoes. Unfortunately for him, he got called back to Sicily for some family disagreement just as the tomatoes were ripening.

Rude boy couldn't be bothered to harvest the tomatoes himself, so he asked us to do it, in exchange for keeping some of the tomatoes ourselves.

It was August 2010. I can date it precisely, because I was going through one of my depressive periods and I know that coincided with the Copiapo mining accident where 33 miners were trapped underground in Chile. I had persuaded my company to let me work from home for two weeks, and my daily life looked something like this. Have a lie-in until all my housemates had left for work. Stay in dressing gown all day obsessively reading updates on the Copiapo incident. Middle of the day, stagger out to the back garden and harvest a load of tomatoes to put in a box in the cupboard. Snooze. Hide from housemates when they arrive back home. Order dominoes pizza. Occasionally send an email or two so work knew I was still alive. I got on best with one particular housemate and occasionally watched the Inbetweeners with her around 10pm, then I stayed up most of the night making origami boxes or writing short stories about depressed people and fell asleep around 3am. Repeat for a month.

Now, the relevant part of this back story is the tomatoes. I didn't know it, but if you harvest all the red tomatoes, it encourages the plant to grow more. The climate must have been particularly good that year, or my diligent harvesting spurred the plants to greater glory, whatever the reason, I harvested kilogrammes of the stuff. When the elderly Sicilian came back, we dutifully handed over two massive trays of beautiful tomatoes and kept schtum about the twenty other trays hidden in the cupboards.

To start with, we tried to eat them fresh. Tomato salad, tomato quiche, fresh tomato pasta sauces every meal. It rapidly became clear that there was no way the four of us could eat the tomatoes fast enough before they went off. And they were good tomatoes, proper Sicilian varieties, way better than anything you can buy in a UK supermarket. So, we put a full industrial tomato processing operation in place. We dried a load of them in the oven with garlic and put them in jars with olive oil. We made vats of tomato chutney, and arrabiata sauce. Everyone we knew got a jar of something tomato-based as a Christmas present that year.

Another feature of the back garden, was that there was no fence between it and our next door neighbour. He was a lovely Indian man who was teaching his eight year old son how to grow various plants, and would give us tips on how to care for the tomato plants. When we started making jars of tomato-based stuff we bartered them across the garden divide for fresh pears, pumpkins, green beans and other yummy produce.

So, the catering at the mince pie party gave a rather false impression of domestic competence. We had trays of home-dried tomatoes with mozzarella, or pear with blue cheese. One of my housemates had spent a long time in Siberia and made tasty little canapés of black bread, beetroot and sour cream. One of the Irish girls lived in Japan for a couple of years, so she made potato cakes, and also silken tofu with spring onions and soy sauce.

These days, while I am shoving frozen fish fingers and chips into the oven, my husband often reminisces about the house he called 'the house of hotties' (there were approximately 12 different young, female housemates in the 18 months I lived there) and how he feels it was false advertising.

I'm attempting to grow tomatoes for the first time in my life. I planted way too many for the size of my planter, but most of them are doing really well. I may need to consult to figure out what to do with them. I vastly underestimated how big the plants would get and how many tomatoes they might produce.

[Antepli Ejderha]

My wife and our experiences of childbirth are strikingly similar. I'll post when I have some time.

[NHH]

Our youngest was a terrible terrible sleeper. We ended up doing similar shuttles, and I used to sleep in the living room with the baby in a pram wearing an one-in-one winter warming snowsuit (it was the height of summer) and found that if I walked around the living room with the pram doing figure of eights for about 25 minutes with a white noise playing app on my phone in the pram with her, she'd eventually sleep. Other times I'd try and put her in front of the washing machine on a beanbag whilst trying to grab 20 minutes sleep.

Once she was too big for that, she went upstairs in her cot. She used to do what we called 'whumping' - she'd basically be lying on her back and would lift her legs up in the air and then bring them down into the cot. It reverberated around the house like the clanging chimes of doom. She'd not sleep for more than 90 minutes at a time, and was seemingly impervious to the tricks her elder sister had been successfully moved to sleep using. We'd just have to stand over her cot arched in some godforsaken position for 30 minutes holding various limbs down until she settled down.

This went on for 6 months until we were both broken husks who couldn't go on and who were both exhibiting classic signs of a lack of any mental wellbeing - me especially. I took the eldest to see grandparents for a few days whilst my wife did controlled crying. After 30 minutes on her own crying, she promptly fell asleep and slept through the first night, and has been an amazing sleeper ever since.

She still carried on whumping, but eventually, we became inured because it didn't presage anything else at all, other than being a weird noise she made. We never found out what it was and why she did it, and eventually stopped by the time she was 2.

[Balderdasha]

Autumn 2013. Very little sleeping in a real bed. My daughter breastfed at all hours of the day and night. I was terrified of cot death (my cousin lost a baby to this when I was about 6 years old. I hadn't met him, but I'd seen a photo, and the news hit me hard), so I wouldn't co-sleep. My daughter had zero intention of sleeping in her cot, so we worked in shifts. I sat in a rocking chair in our lounge in the dark, watching Stacey Dooley documentaries or Bollywood movies on silent (the only things that were on at 4am, we hadn't signed up to Netflix yet). I would feed our baby for hours until I found myself unable to stay awake any longer, then I'd wake up my husband and pass her over. He undoubtedly had a hard time as he didn't have anything he could feed the baby with, so he just tried to keep her happy as long as possible before he had to wake me up again. One of his patented techniques was to hold her over his shoulder, stand in the bathroom with the shower on and the lights off chanting 'saunana, saunana, we're having a lovely saunana' (other friends with a young baby had found that omnian chanting on youtube helped, general advice recommended white noise, my husband was using both). During this period my husband was so tired he accidentally shaved off his eyebrows one morning (he was attempting a trim, I responded with hysterical laughter), and once went to work wearing his dad's shoes which were two sizes too small and assumed that the discomfort was due to his feet swelling because of stress.

When I did actually sleep in my own bed, I would wake after an hour or so, frantic with worry and try hunting through the duvet to find my daughter who I was convinced was suffocating (she was not, she was safely asleep in her cot).

[andrew7610]

February 1989, Paris, on the plinth at the foot of the Statue of Liberty by Pont de Grenelle.

I was the last of the 3 of us to stir, and only then because my friends kicked me awake to announce the arrival of a tourist boat that had sailed up one side of the island in the Seine and pulled up broadside across the river in front of the Statue as all those aboard leaned over the side to take photos which we were now spoiling.

[NHH]

Christ that is almost identical to our experience in Brighton, post caesarian. The emergency-style care was fucking magnificent, but when you moved down and became something of a cog in the system, you realised the system stank.

I remember coming back the day afterward, similarly full of beans and seeing my wife looking like a Vietnam vet who's been rescued from deep up-river. She'd basically been left in a bed holding our daughter (who was a very hefty 10lbs) but couldn't adjust her position any, and couldn't reach the call button, and so had to hold onto the baby to stop her falling off the bed, and she didn't have the energy to do much more than croak. She'd been in labour for all the previous night and hadn't slept* and was by now hallucinating, and given the screams and wails of labouring women, basically imagined herself to be in some living Hieronymous Bosch painting.

Then, in the middle of this, they finally came around at about 3am to check the baby, found some respiratory issues they were concerned about and wanted her admitted to ICU, and so she couldn't sleep then, either. She finally got back from ICU when the baby was given the all-clear and I found them both fast asleep when I came back the next day. That day was dominated by attempts to get the baby to feed, and the nurses were spectacularly useless, imagining that the issue was somehow a failure of will on my wife's part, rather than a basic engineering problem driven by a large baby, a small mouth and a complete lack of core muscular control because of the c-section (NCT support was equally useless, imagining the problem was somehow a failure to 'connect' with the baby. Fucking wasters).

They gave us the all-clear to be discarged the next morning, but we needed to be issued a prescription fot the various anti-biotics and painkillers for the c-section, which took 10 hours to get hold of. I kept saying to the nurses about wanting to go home, and offering to do something, anything to speed things up, but the system was the system, and the system's fundamental shitness was something everyone who had to experience it daily had come to a zen-like acceptance of, leaving everyone of us who were experiencing it for the first time to feel like we were in some kind of weird sci-fi movie where the 'normal' people who are actually aliens gaslight the only remaining human protagonists.

We then had 36 hours for the rest of the weekend to fail to make the breastfeeding work, leaving a screaming hungry baby, and a virtually crippled mother who hadn't properly recovered who basically had red-raw nipples and a baby who treated them rubbing a cheese grater over them. I tried to find a pharmacy only to find there was none open until the next morning anywhere. It felt like one of those schlocky TV movies where someone says that the police can't get to help for a time, and so they'll have to fend off the bears/serial killers themselves until first light.

I ran down to Boots in town which wasn't scheduled to open until 8.30am, but the wonderful kind assistant who saw the look of terror on my face as I knocked on the door at 8 recognised someone in need. I made a special note to remember her name to write to Boots afterwards, and had forgotten it by the time I got home, which I always feel guilty about; she heard me babble incoherently and picked up a basket and walked around picking up a breast pump and other accoutrements which we'd completely forgotten to engage with, so taken in as we were by the NCT mantra of breast always being best to the extent that anything else is Fucking Shit And Will Damage Your Baby For Life Because We Can't Work Out Causation vs Correlation.

By the time our second came around, we knocked the 100% breast thing on the head because it was too punishing for my wife and meant she never got a decent night's sleep so much. Though I do remember with our first when we went up to Wembley for the FA Community Shield and we were in the Royal Box because of my job, and thinking it was probably there can't have been many requests of the FA hospitality people about where was the best place for a woman to go and pump and dump at the new stadium.

* it turned out our daughter was breech, something 2 examinations by midwives in the weeks leading up to the birth had failed to diagnose, so our plans for a home birth very quickly became plans to get in an ambulance with flashing lights all of a sudden when they said they couldn't be sure the cord wasn't around the baby's neck

[Balderdasha]

Summer 2013: Heatwave. I was extremely pregnant. 6 days overdue in fact. I'd spent the last few weeks sitting with my swollen feet in buckets of ice water and sleeping draped in cold wet flannels. Clapham common had a paddling pool next to an ice cream shop and that had become my Mecca.

2am, I woke up and went to the loo, and realised my waters had broken. Having been a diligent student at our NCT classes, I stuck a pad in my knickers to check the waters, and discovered the baby was passing meconium. I woke my husband up, we grabbed our hospital bag and called a taxi. The driver went to the wrong hospital first, but we weren't hugely concerned. I was having mild contractions but clearly not about to give birth immediately.

After a couple of hours wait at the hospital, the doctor confirmed the presence of meconium which stymied our aim to be on the 'home from home' midwife-led birthing unit and we were sent straight to the consultant-led side. Some very nice midwives explained that meconium indicated the baby may be in distress, so the aim was to get the baby out within the day, preferably by natural birth. Because I was only having mild contractions I was hooked up to a syntocinon drip (synthetic oxytocin, triggers stronger contractions) and began labouring in earnest.

I spent 16 hours on syntocinon, having intense contractions every couple of minutes, using only gas and air, a yoga ball, and lots of Bob Marley songs as pain relief. Every so often, a consultant would walk in, look at the contraction charts, look at me calmly breathing and bouncing, and assume I'd already had an epidural. When the midwives corrected them, they would look at me again, with a mixture of awe and disbelief.

The scariest part of the day was when my daughter's heart beat dropped. The midwife asked my husband to pull the emergency cord and warned that the room would suddenly be a lot busier. He pulled the cord and ten plus people rushed into the room ready to declare an emergency and slice me open there and then. Fortunately, my daughter's heart rate recovered and the midwives supported me to continue trying for a natural birth.

Sadly, after the 16 hours, I still had not dilated, and all the medical staff agreed that at that point the safest route forward was a caesarian. 24 hours after waters break increases the risk of infection for the baby, and my daughter had been passing meconium all day, she needed to come out. We signed all the necessary paperwork and went for a slightly more controlled caesarian.

I am slightly a control freak with medical treatments. I like to be told exactly what is going to happen next, what precisely is being injected into me, etc. I explained this to the anaesthetist who was going to give me a spinal injection. I had to be taken off gas and air to be taken through to the operating room, and was hit with the full back-arching pain of my contractions. The anaesthetist added something innocuous to my drip, probably antibiotics, without telling me first and I lost my shit. Inbetween excruciating contractions, I gave her a massive lecture on patient consultation and informed consent. Baffled, she asked if I really wanted her to tell me the exact name of everything she was putting in me. Yes, I yelled through gritted teeth, the full latin name whether I know what it means or not.

Eventually, she told me the names of the anaesthetics and antibiotics and anti-clotting agents and whatever else they were putting in me. I managed to hold my back still enough for the injection and I lay back ready for the operation.

Trying to describe the experience of having a caesarian is weird. The drugs they give you knock out your pain sensation and your temperature sensation, but not all sensation. They spray you with a cold spray so you can pinpoint which areas of your abdomen have been successfully anaesthetised. If you had never been pregnant, the feeling of someone cutting and pulling layers aside and rummaging around would no doubt be very weird. But if you're having a caesarian, then by definition you have just experienced pregnancy where for the last five or so months you've been able to feel an alien parasite somersaulting and kicking inside you.

My husband sat near my head, distracting me with lovely memories of our holidays in Barbados and Thailand and holding my hand and reassuring me. All we wanted was for our daughter to be ok. I was acutely aware that meconium can cause brain damage if inhaled. As our daughter came out, she cried immediately, it was a beautiful sound. Even better, the surgeon laughed with relief and said 'would you like to see her?' as he lifted her above the curtain that had screened us from the surgery. She was fat and red and filthy, thrashing her legs and crying in anger, wonderfully alive and well.

My husband followed her to where she was being checked over (we'd agreed in advance that I didn't want him to let her out of our sight) and then she was brought back to me to lie on my chest while I was sewn up.

My daughter was born just before midnight, we were moved into a recovery room in the early hours of the morning. I was still paralysed from the ribs down to my knees, but my husband managed to help position our daughter onto my chest so she could latch on and breastfeed. I wanted to do that as soon as possible. It was a pretty amazing feeling that both my body and my daughter knew how to do this totally bizarre new interaction.

Around dawn we were moved onto a general mother and baby ward. Before the birth, we had looked into the costs of private rooms at St. Thomas's hospital. It was £850 a night, not something we could really countenance, especially as after a caesarian you're usually in for two or three nights. If I was living that time again though, I'd pay for the private room.

The ward I was on had four mothers and babies. I was right next to the window, and the warmth and excess sunshine meant I got a heat rash. Next to me was a woman whose baby was struggling to breastfeed properly. She'd previously been discharged, then readmitted because the baby was losing weight. The midwives were trying to re-establish breastfeeding, but the mother kept panicking and secretly feeding the baby from a bottle. The midwives were frustrated that the mother wasn't following their advice. The mother was distraught and thought they were trying to starve her baby. There were lots of very emotional arguments all through the night. Opposite from me, a mother had a baby with jaundice who had to be under a special light for most of the day. The mother had had a caesarian only a few hours before me and the midwives kept refusing to help her pick up her baby or change its nappy. I couldn't understand why they were so mean to her. They kept saying 'what will you do when you're at home on your own?' Meanwhile, they were helping me pick up my baby because I hadn't yet been able to get out of bed. I had to conclude racism. The other mother was Indian and I eventually offered to act as a witness for her if she wanted to put in a formal complaint.

At that time, fathers were not allowed to stay on the ward overnight, so the night after our daughter was born, my husband went home to get some sleep and I began the longest night of my life. My daughter needed breastfeeding at least every hour or two hours. I physically couldn't lift her in or out of the cot next to the bed, I still had a catheter in, I still couldn't stand (I had tried to earlier in the day and nearly passed out). So, when I needed to move my daughter I had to call for the midwives. They were overworked, so I was often left in a situation where either, I had just finished feeding my daughter and had to try not to fall asleep with her in my arms before the midwives got there, or my daughter woke up crying in her cot and the only thing I could do was sing nursery rhymes to her while waiting for the midwives to bring her to me. I felt helpless, and like a terrible mother. I barely slept that night so I was running on 3 days with almost no sleep.

The next day, my husband came back, I could nap a bit, a midwife finally removed my catheter after noticing it was full to bursting point, I managed to stagger out of bed and have a shower. I had another long night but it wasn't as bad as the first one.

On day three, we were working to be discharged, but it took a long time. I found myself saying, oh well, if we have to stay another night, at least I'll get dinner provided, and we realised I was becoming institutionalised. We insisted that we would be leaving within the hour whether we had signed the paperwork or not, and that hurried things up.

Back home, we closed the door to the flat, our daughter was asleep in the car seat. I looked around desperately and realised I was looking for where the responsible adults were. There were none. It was just us. 'What do we do now?' I asked my husband. 'Go and have a nice bubble bath' he said. So I did.