Baby Bear is now twenty-four weeks old and apparently about a foot long. A foot long already? And I still have another 16 weeks to go. How big is this thing going to get? How does it fit? I don’t really want my belly to get any bigger – well maybe just a little bit bigger. I think I am still at the stage whereby people are unsure whether to congratulate me because I am pregnant or feel sorry for me because I have clearly put weight on since I last saw them and should really go on a diet. The weird thing is that I am actually looking forward to Baby Bear emerging from my body so that I can start getting back in to shape. In reality, at that time I will probably continue to eat bread and mars bars – surely the staple diet required for any new mums. Until the time when I am definitely pregnant to people who don’t know me, I find myself rubbing my belly when in public to try and make it more obvious.

I experienced another step on my evolution to becoming an actual swimmer this week when I experienced ‘swim rage’ towards people getting in my way when I was trying to get my twenty lengths of granny breaststroke in. How dare people talk to each other and be sociable in the pool. How dare people encroach on my area of the pool. How dare people swim faster or slower than me. All entirely unacceptable behaviour. Not quite as enraging as tourists standing on the left-hand side of the escalator on the underground; my shake of the head and associated ‘tut’ has been fine tuned over the last few years and is really quite effective now. Swim rage still needs some work. I can’t swim and shake my head and tut at the same time yet.

Another kind of rage now and American President rage – surprisingly I have not mentioned him yet in this blog series. Mr Trump has asked for global warming to come back because it is a bit chilly in America at the moment. Mr Trump, I think you may need to study the effects of Global Warming a little more before you send your thoughts in to the wider world. But just a hint. Global Warming may actually have something to do with this extreme weather you are experiencing. I think the following definition will be useful for you in just about everything that you do or say: Reality: The state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them”. (OED)

And whilst I am in the generous mood of helping some of the worlds ‘leaders’; back to the subject of Unicorn Brexit Shmexit. Mrs May I would like to remind you of Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity. He quite eloquently states it as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I might just leave this with you.

Jeff has now been semi-permanently relocated to the bathroom after the advice of a horticulturist friend. We will monitor him and see how he gets on in there. It means that J can chat to him while he is in the shower which I think he likes.

Snow, snow, snow, slush, slush, slush. Stop everything. Stock pile food, don’t go to work…. alternatively, don’t be so dramatic and just carry on? Stiff upper lip and all that? We are so un British when it comes to our reaction to snow. Perhaps we are more European than we thought……