Coombe Hill Birthday Circular Walk

In which I take the Chap for a walk in the fresh air for his birthday, think about how having a baby (ie, childbirth) is not as bad as people make it out to be, think about how actually having a baby (ie, in your house) is a lot harder than all those advertisers pretending we float past on a lily pad while wearing pastels are making it out to be, and admire the trippy woodland.

Ordnance Survey: Explorer 181
Time: 1 hour and a bit

Distance: 3 miles

Rating: Easy-Moderate Walk (a little map reading, very windy, a lot of mud)

Determined I was going to leave the house and not get my walk rained off, and inspired by a the book Chilterns Teashop Walks sent to me by Geekysweetheart, I decided it was high time I had a look at Coombe Hill. A picture of it is on the front of my Ordnance Survey map, and it's one of those places I've looked at for a few years and thought 'must go there', so I thought I may as well get on with it.

Safe in the knowledge that I would have cake to make up for my exertion, I decided to do this walk on the Chap's birthday. He was one year old this week, and that has lead to a lot of reflection and general assessment of the year between his father and I. We've decided that he has passed his probationary year and will continue within his employment as our son. On the whole, phrases like 'bloody hard work', 'I see what you are doing, and it is good', 'bloody hard work', 'completely knackered' and 'bloody hard work' passed our lips, mostly once he had gone to bed and we were quietly dealing with a bottle of champagne that needed drinking.

In fact, I think it is fair to say I was in labour for about 10 months or so - the actual act of getting the Chap out was hard work, but in many ways the labour that came afterwards (particularly in the first 6 weeks) was far, far worse. Hard bloody work, as Dick-Read asserts in Childbirth Without Fear (an interesting aside - did you know that the 'agony in childbirth' promised by the Bible is a mistranslation? The Hebrew words 'etsev' and 'itstsabon' are synonyms, but one got translated as 'hard work' in relation to a man farming and the other got translated as 'suffering' when it came to talk about chidbirth. It was a marvellous book to read in preparation for labour - although being a bit dry in parts and slightly quaint in its views every now and again, knowing about fear-tension-pain cycles and how the best way to have terrible contractions is to say to someone "The next one will be really bad, you must be brave" was really helpful.).
Coombe Hill has its own car park and a nice, obvious entrance gate, so I went through that and walked on the path that went straight across the middle of the field. Although I went further afield, this whole area would be fantastic if you have an off-road pram (or have a child who doesn't mind a bit of jiggling in a normal buggy) - even now, at the wettest time of year, the ground was pretty firm and there are a fair few packed-earth paths. Follow the path through a patch of woodland until you come out onto the wide grassy area and follow the obvious route towards the war memorial.

People seem to delight in telling you how awful childbirth is when you're going to have a baby. No-one ever tells you how funny it is. The ridiculous things my friends have done, such as shouting "THREE! TWO! ONE! RELAX!" in a manner that to everyone else seems anything but relaxing, or taking the mouthpiece from the gas & air out to pronounce "I haven't been this pissed in ages.". The favourite one from my labour was in searching for more towels to protect our carpet, I sent my husband into the cupboard to find an old towel that I knew was in there. I could feel the contraction coming, and just as it began I saw my husband turn around holding one of our best towels. "Is this is?" he asked, and with a contraction just starting to bite I was lying on the bed proclaiming "Nooo! Not the ones from John Lewis!".

Follow the Ridgeway
to Coombe Hill War Memorial

I meant to follow the grassy field all the way to the memorial but off to the left I saw a path heading through gorse bushes towards a pretty impressive view, so I followed went that way and found myself on the Ridgeway National Trail. I also found the views, which are pretty impressive.


I turned right and followed the Ridgeway up to the War Memorial, where I found some more views and a Welshman whose birthday it also was. He had taken the day off to take some photos, and had been pleased to find that someone he knew was listed on the war memorial, so he was taking some photos to send to his old regiment's history people. He kindly took a picture of me & the Chap with my camera, but it was too windy to be any good, really - I had too much hair flying about.



Continue to follow the Ridgeway around the edge of the hill - it's conveniently signposted by black posts with the National Trust acorn on.

This path leads you out of the designated National Trust Coombe Hill area. I left through a metal gate and then crossed a bridleway sunken into the hillside. Through a second metal gate, I continued slightly downwards towards Bacombe Hill.

By this point, I got the sense that maybe the Chap was a touch peckish. What could have given this away...?

"...or I'll eat my hat"

Marmite rice cake provided (the latest unexpected baby delicacy - but when I fished the first one out of the packet the other day his eyes lit up like a Hobbit declaring "It comes in pints?" and he has been a firm fan of them ever since) and the hat safe from chewing, we continued along the Ridgeway until you come to a fork - the Ridgeway goes downhill to the left, and an unmarked path looking like a sheep trail goes to the right.

I took the right hand sheep trail and followed this round a scrubby group of trees to effectively do a U-turn so I was then following the top of the rise along the treeline. Not far along this there is a wooden gate in a break in the trees- I went through this and then took the muddy path to the right through the woodland.

For a lot of this year, I have found dealing with the Chap really, really hard. Mostly because of sleep deprivation. For a long time he completely destroyed any semblance of quality of life that I had, and it has only recently I have felt like I have begun to get it back. For a long time I felt like I was sort of stuck. I found that I had a lot of conflicting emotions around being somebody's mother, but I found it really difficult to talk about any of it for fear of any of the slightest suggestion that maybe I don't love everything about being a mother would be indicative of me not coping. The concept of demonstrating 'coping' was very important to me for a long time, but I haven't thought about it for what feels like so long now, I think I must be fine. But I was terrified people would think I had not formed enough of a bond with my child, was being self-indulgent and generally the sort of person who should be slapped right onto the Safeguarding database so everyone can peer at my child's progress and judge me on it from now until the end of time.

 Basically, I think it boils down to the fact that this baby shit is _hard_. It's way harder than I thought it was going to be, and that's because I don't think anything can actually prepare you for the full on relentlessness of it. To quote Caitlin Moran (as oft I do these days),  'The parallels to war are multiple: you wear the same clothes day in, day out; you keep saying, hopefully 'It'll all be over by Christmas'; it's long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror'. The problem is, to say that child rearing is hard is expected, but to say you're not enjoying it is perceived to be an appalling affront to the very heart of motherhood. You! Not enjoying being woken up three times a night! Not enjoying having your hair and flesh repeatedly pulled! How dare you! Get on the database! You can tell people about isolated events that you dislike, but to actually sum up the whole activity as quite a cavalcade of unrelenting shit is somehow Not Cricket.

But there's the other side of the coin, because while, on the one hand, it is unrelenting shit, it's also lovely. There's a tiny little chap who wriggles round the floor and sticks inappropriate things in his mouth and learns all the time and is really happy to see you and lifts up his little hands so you'll pick him up and who you love with an extraordinary intensity.

But at the same time, he had, for a really long time, shot my quality of life through both kneecaps. A mother, we are taught to expect, is Selfless in caring for her child. How dare I resent not being able to go to the Opera any more! I should welcome the repetitive round of feeding and cleaning, because it is all For The Good Of My Child. How dare I find it boring!

Actually, I don't find it boring, not all the time. I like his enthusiasm for sticking things in his mouth, I am amused by the faces he makes, by him smearing himself in spoon-food, and by the damage four teeth could do to a slice of cucumber, the the destruction eight teeth can wreak on an apple.  But some days, playing with blocks is still playing with blocks, and I'm a bit old for it to be truly stimulating.
And now I feel comfortable to say all this, or at least to put it on the Internet, and I don't really think it means I'm a bad mother. Some people might like to think that of me, but hey ho. There's a Canadian website called Bad Moms Club (missing the apostrophe, I know, but it's them not me), so called because one of the main things you have to deal with  is that someone, somewhere, really does think you're a bad mother. And while it shouldn't matter, to be honest, it does matter to most of us. I don't think I'm over it, but I can say all this stuff about how I didn't like this or that and I know people will pop up on Facebook or somewhere and say to me 'yes, yes I felt that too', and that has really helped my sanity. And let's face it, sanity can wear pretty thin when you've been woken up at 12, 3 and 6 for months on end.

Anyway, this woodland. It's a funny one. The trees have been coppiced and (probably due to the handsome winds that blow around the top of the hill) are very... well, wiggly. I don't know if it was the day I was there and the light, but the colours were really weird - the bronzey orange of the leaves on the floor had some strange effect with the green algae that grows on the trees to make them seem almost like they were glowing. I hadn't taken anything, I promise. The colours were really kicking out.

Squelching along this muddy woodland path will ultimately lead you back to the Coombe Hill car park. It took me longer than expected because it was so muddy when I was there, but it was definitely better than retracing my steps.

Things I Learnt

• Oof, it's windy up there.
• I had forgotten my desperation for a lot of the year to demonstrate 'coping'. It involved doing my hair before I went out and pretending everything was fine. Pretending that I could be arsed about losing the baby weight. Lots of stuff felt unreal, as if when we were complaining about stuff we were acting out parts, and none of us really felt anything. People felt oddly interchangeable, possibly due to repetitive initial conversations with women in Children's Centres that I would never see again. Going to the Sling Meet has helped. Having a lot of people sitting round going "Were you the weird one in your postnatal group too?" "YES! I talked and everyone else just sat there looking at me like I was crackers!" is oddly reassuring...
•  I am, as I always knew, not really a baby person. Now the Chap is one, I am delighted. For the past couple of months, he's been a great age. This is what I wanted- to have a child, to produce a person. And even though he will grow up and disagree with me and slam doors and bring inappropriate people home, that will all be part of him being him. Which I think will always be better than the tiny baby stage, even when it's horrible.
  
  It's been a long post, this one. Thank you if you're still here with me at the end :)

The Fitzherbert Arms, Swynnerton (Circular Walk)

In which I wave cheerily at the pub where I had my first job, see yet more interesting fungi I am unable to identify, and think about the latest UK gubbins around childbirth choices.

Ordnance Survey Number: Explorer 258
Distance: 3.5 miles approx
Time: 100 mins

Rating: Moderate (numerous stiles to be crossed, and map reading to be done)

I had a rubbish week last week. The Chap was ill, and ran a 38-39 degree temperature for 3 days. I'd rather forgotten how 24 hour being a parent is - now I get woken up a maximum of once a night or not at all, I rather feel that the time after 8pm until I go to bed is 'time off'. Lies! The Chap was a very sad little fellow, and refused to sleep at all unless he was on a person for two of the three nights he was ill. This meant I pulled a half-nighter (lasted until 3am on Saturday morning, when I had to go and turf the ChapDad out of bed before I died), and with a little more preparation, an all-nighter (11.30pm - 5am). There was then some wazzockry on Sunday night once he was well but had a disrupted sleep pattern. Pale shadows of our former selves, my husband and I discussed it and decided it was time to admit that the job had got too big for two knackered people. I left the ChapDad to sleep, while I ran away up the country to spend a few days with my parents in Staffordshire.

Glamour, thy name is rambling.

After two naps and a full night's sleep (thank you Mummy for dealing with the 2.30am feed request), I decided I was awake enough to try for a walk with my Daddy. He was a little concerned that he would be required to produce a quantity of feminist thinking; I let him off that bit.

And fair enough, really, because what's been on my mind is childbirth (as the news has announced both the recommendation for allowing women to have elective caesarians, and a new report has made some claims regarding the safety of first time home births). There's really a tolerance level for the number of times one can use the words 'vaginal delivery' to your father. I think one is really the optimum number. Bless 'im, I was 38 weeks at Christmas last year, and the combination of them visiting plus me being booked for a homebirth left him quite jittery. Fortunately, The Chap arrived 40 weeks to the day and appeared well into January, when everyone had left and festivities had quietened down.

The beauty of the Fitz's car park

We started at The Fitzherbert Arms pub, where I worked for...ooo, a couple of months before leaving the late nights and potential vomit to opt to be an early morning cleaner instead. I had to clear out trucker's toilets in the newer job, but it was quiet and no-one felt the need to comment on me being 'built for comfort, not for speed'. The charmers.

Unidentified fungus #1

Standing with your back to the Alison Bar, leave the car park and turn right down Early Lane. Continue to the end of the road and then head straight on down the green lane, where we found the first of our unidentified fungus for this walk.








The green lane finishes and you emerge into a field. We were pleased by the portly fellow indicated on the sign, so I took a picture of the matching portly fellow I had with me.

Cross diagonally over the first, second and third fields, where we found the second and third of our unidentified fungi. At the end of the field, cross over the A519, taking care as you descend down a pretty steep & nasty bank - I did it by holding onto the signpost and going down the side of the path rather than the main, slightly muddied route.

Unidentified fungus #2

Unidentified fungus #3

Once you have survived the descent and got onto the path, turn left and follow the field boundary. My father identified a pair of partridges as they flew away from us, and then pointed out a couple of badger sets, which one of his friends had been heard to leap up and down near, crying 'Get up, lazy bones*! It's half past ten!'. Sadly, the badgers, being nocturnal, were unlikely to comply.

Too big for rabbit,
too small for badger...

*The shouter is a grown, middle-aged man and did not shout 'lazy bones', but I have been struck by modesty and am paraphrasing more politely.

We then passed another hole, and stood for a little while discussing if it was for a rabbit (too big) or a badger (too small). Moving on past the tree roots where the burrow was found, we saw the clue to the owner: a pile of feathers suggested that a fox was at work in the area.




So yes, as I mentioned, I had a homebirth for my first child. The thing is, the route the that decision was an interesting one. When I had my 10 week visit from a midwife, I was totally of the "I've never had a baby before, I have no idea what I'm doing! Send me to hospital! Bring me a consultant!". Four weeks later, we went for four days in Haworth in Yorkshire, home of a number of sobering headstones of the sort you don't wish to see while 14 weeks pregnant:

The inscription reads "In memory of  Elizabeth, daughter of Joseph and Mary Leeming
of Keighley, who died August 20th 1855 in the 6th year of her age. Also eleven infants
 of theirs, also two infants of theirs, also of Sarah Elizabeth their daughter who died
December 16th 1862 in the 2nd Year of her age, also of an infant of theirs, also of Fred
 their sonwho died November 19th 1869 in the 4th year of his age.".
 My heart goes out to Joseph and Mary Leeming of Keighley....

Which, if nothing else, makes me incredibly grateful to live in an age where a) I can choose when I want to be pregnant, and b) we understand the importance of clean water (Haworth had one of the worst mortality rates in the country due to a number of factors, no small part being that their water supply was coming through the graveyard before getting to the standpipes).

We also popped across to Leeds to see one of James' University friends, whose second child was around a month old at the time. His wife, who hadn't enjoyed the birth of her first child in hospital, had had a home water birth. She delivered what was a quite fearsome polemic on how women need to educate themselves about childbirth (after all, you don't get in a car and expect to drive it straight away), thrust a copy of Childbirth Without Fear into my hand, while keeping Gina Ford's Contented Little Baby firmly on the bookshelf ("We've got that copy trapped on the bookshelf so it won't fall into any unsuspecting hands!"). I went away and read it, and started to think...

Buryhurst Pit

Continue to the end of the field, where we excited a number of large dogs in kennels. While we had been on holiday in August, the Chap had burst into tears and screamed when a large dog had barked at him, but fortunately  he was asleep by this point - I don't think he would have enjoyed it too much. Cross over a stile next to the kennels, and turn immediately left and cross over a second stile to go up a slightly wooded path. This then widens to a not enormously attractive, but functional path that leads you back to the A519. Cross over this and take the path to the left along the field boundary, go over the stile at the end and turn right down the green lane. This will take you past the Buryhurst Pit ("Oo, it's a marl pit." said my father. I grunted ignorantly, but apparently it's an area where clay has been removed, and has then filled up with water. So there you go.), and an industrial estate that appears to be a storage area for, among other things, caravans, buses, a broken doll's house, a boat registered in Southampton (and impressively lost) and the transporters for the North Staffordshire Racer Pigeon Federation. This path then goes on for a fair way, and at the end it got pretty muddy, with Daddy powering ahead while I took things a little slower for fear of falling and doing The Chap a mischief.

Because doing the Chap a mischief is not something I have wanted to do, so I did a lot of research into home births before making my choice. A report has come out today in The Telegraph  saying that home births for first time mothers are more likely to lead to complications to the baby, and that is something you have to take into account when planning a home birth. It was something we talked about a lot - if the baby dies and we're at home, we will blame ourselves for having a home birth, regardless of whether or not he would have died in hospital as well. Yet, for all the scaremongering in this report, tucked away beneath the scroll down and beyond the golden third paragraph is the sentence

"The researchers stressed that giving birth [at home] is generally very safe as 250 babies suffered complications from the 64,538 births in the study."

So, while that is terrible for the 500 parents who had to deal with the complications, the risks are still very, very low. Yet at the same time, I heard someone on the radio saying that an elective caesarian was a better choice because if you deliver vaginally there is 'danger of prolapse', but the Journal of Midwifery and Women's Health says :

There have been many studies trying to find out which is the safest way to have a baby. At this time, there is no proof that having a C-section is safer or protects against future problems with leaking urine or stool, or uterine prolapse. Because there are more medical risks for women who have a C-section compared to women who have a vaginal birth, vaginal birth is safer.

Also, there's a lot of hoo-hah about how you give birth (no-one gives you a medal), but it is hard to express to someone who hasn't done it how vulnerable you feel post-childbirth. You have just gone through a major physical event. If you're going to run a marathon, you train and prepare for it, they give you a start date and time, you do it, and then you take time out to recover. Childbirth is an effort I think it would be fair to equate with a marathon, but instead of a nice, clear start date you get a five week window, in which your marathon can start at any time. Sometimes you feel you have been taken up to the starting line, only to be told that it's all off and you can go back home. And once you've finally done it, there's no time to recover - you are then woken up every three hours or so for at least three months. Add to that being awash with hormones trying to sort out the fact you're not pregnant and the sudden reality of your life having changed forever (again, you can be told about it all you like, but the way it feels...). It's tough. It's really, really tough.

I may have had a homebirth - and I would recommend it, the experience of childbirth was amazing. I had been worried about feeling out of control, but my main memories of it are a sense of doing something that was really hard work physically, but doing it really well. Upon being told I as 8 centimetres dilated, I remember wanting to argue to my midwife and say "Are you sure? I thought this should hurt more?". I very clearly remember thinking "Actually, I don't need any of you here at all, I could do this all on my own like a cat in a cupboard.". It wasn't really painful - apart from crowning, which lead to me to say something akin to 'Gosh, gosh, goshity gosh'.

But I digress. Homebirth was great for me, but an elective caesarian might be great for someone else. But, as The Guardian noted, "Malcolm Griffiths, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at Luton and Dunstable hospital, who chaired the guidelines committee, said: "Caesarean section is major surgery. It is about as major as hysterectomy, after which you go home and do nothing for six weeks and some employers won't expect you back for six months. After a caesarean we send a lady home after two days and say 'here's a baby to look after as well'."

I am pro choice for whatever a woman feels is right for her. But what is the most important thing is that women are educated fully about childbirth so they are able to make informed decisions, and as things stand at the moment, the free antenatal education I received was very poor indeed (3 hours from our local NHS), and had I relied on that I think my experience of birth would have been very, very different.

Anyway, walking. You finally appear out on Cotes Lane - the man on the sign pointing back the way we had come looked considerably trimmer than the one we had seen at the start of our walk. Sadly, neither of us had become that markedly slimmer in the time it had taken us to do our walk, and I will still be relying on Big Pants to fit me into my dress for The Godmother's wedding in 4 weeks time.

Turn left, up a precipitous set of steps and go over a stile that is angled sloping backwards, making it a bit unnerving to cross, particularly if you have a small Chap strapped to your front. He had just woken up, and did not look wholly impressed.

St Mary's Church, Swynnerton

Cross the field, go over your final stile into a strip of woodland and turn left. Go through a metal kissing gate and follow the path straight across the field and then along the field boundary until you pop out beside the cricket club. Follow the path along the side of the grounds until you come out onto Park View. Cross the road and continue forward up an alley that will lead you onto a pavement alongside the unclassified road through Swynnerton. Turn left and follow the pavement, waving happily at Lord Stafford's mansion and the local Anglican and Catholic Churches on the other side of the road until you round the corner and find yourself back at the Fitzherbert Arms. And you haven't had to use the phrase 'vaginal delivery' to your father once.






Things I learnt

• What a marl pit is. I should have known that, having lived in Staffordshire for many years. Most things are to do with pots there. It sort of took the gloss off Chinese museums filled with Ming dynasty vases, because I was so sick of looking at pots in museums here. Always love a handsome Tang Dynasty camel, mark you.
• Almost everyone gets a little bit messed up after childbirth. I had friends who regretted being induced which led to C-Section, or regretted getting to the pushing stage and then needing an episiotomy, or regretted not having a contraction at all when they had to have a C-section due to pre-eclampsia. I still wish I hadn't had to go into hospital to get stitched up - it was my treatment there that means I get mild panicky flashbacks that sent me to get some therapy. But put it this way - a new person comes into the world, and they either come out through your fu-fu, or it has to be cut out of you. As amazing as that experience is, it will be a bit of a shock.
• As much as I may bitch about stuff, I haven't had to bury 17 children as the Leemings had to. I don't know how you do that and stay sane. There's nothing I can say about how the thought of that experience makes me feel. It's too big. There are no words.