Viva Lewes Issue #134 November 2017

COLUMN
Chloë King
Totally wired
By the time you read this
I will be giving, or have
given, or be about to
give birth to my second
child. How about that for
a bombshell? A pregnant
woman with a magazine
column that, previous
sentence excepted, hasn’t
mentioned in that column
that she is a pregnant
woman!
I assume it will surprise
because at 37 weeks I'm
still meeting people on the High St who say
delightedly, “I didn’t know you were expecting!”
I do wonder why this comment is always
prefixed by “I didn’t know”. I expect it’s a
linguistic development popularised since the
advent of social media. Before Facebook, one
wouldn’t expect to have up-to-date knowledge
about another person’s life unless said person
was someone you occasionally telephoned,
invited for a drink, or had essentially been
present with in conversation at some point
over the last few months. Now, and I too am
guilty of this, we often imagine that we have
made personal contact with a dear friend just
because we have followed their ‘status’ online.
Unfortunately, it’s just not the same.
You see, I haven’t been keeping it secret that
I am pregnant, I just haven’t posted about
my condition online. Either way, it should be
glaringly obvious to anyone who knows me well
because I’m not stood outside the Lewes Arms
with a pint of Harvey’s and a roll-up in hand.
I chose not to tweet about it because I’m
becoming increasingly concerned about the
untested consequences of children’s lives being
documented online. That, and the pressure
which we’re all under
for our circumstances
to measure up to a
perfectly edited version
of those of our peers. I’ve
also learnt, as someone
prone to coming up with
ambitious action plans,
shouting about them
and then sitting down,
that the kind interest of
friends and acquaintances
can become a tyranny of
having to forever answer
the question “have you done x yet?”.
Keeping my news on the down-low is unlikely
to prevent the upsurge in “have you popped
yet?” that occurs as one enters the gym
ball stage of pregnancy, but it has limited a
substantial number of conversations about my
intimate bodily functions.
Speaking of which, I went to yoga for the first
time last night. (There’s something else I bet
you didn’t know, that there was, until yesterday,
a single surviving female member of the
gentrified Lewes community who had not yet
tried yoga).
If any reader is feeling cheated about my lack
of pregnancy-related gossip, I can now happily
reveal that I discovered three things at my
LushTums antenatal yoga class. One, that Mum
was right: it really is hard not to fart in balasana
pose. Two: that, aside from the risk of farting
among strangers, yoga is genuinely an extremely
pleasurable thing to do. And three, I am
personally so unused to purposeful relaxation
that even after a large slice of Waitrose meat
pie; a ninety-minute yoga session; a Radox bath
and a 30-minute hypnotic download, I still felt
totally wired.
Illustration by Chloë King
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