Being an avid reader of disposable trash mags such as Heat magazine (despite Mukiwa’s earnest and well-meaning attempts to persuade me of the irredeemable evil of such publications), I have noticed recently that Kelly Osbourne has been lauded for her dramatic weight loss, and all the glossies are showing pictures of her sporting her new, beautiful, look.

A couple of years ago, her brother Jack lost a lot of his puppy fat, and immediately appeared in such features as ‘Torso of the Week’.

I don’t know what PR deals the ever resourceful Sharon has put in place with all of these magazines, but I feel I need to be a lone voice of reason, and point out that it doesn’t matter how thin they are, the spawn of Ozzy and Shaz are just not attractive, and it doesn’t matter if they embark on a Nicole Ritchie style abstemiousness, they never will be.

Little Brother and his girlfriend, Pretty, came to lunch yesterday. Babyfather did most of the cooking, as me standing for any length of time is becoming less tenable, and I kept having to perch on my birthing ball to ease out the lower back pains which are plaguing me more and more. We cooked a rolled shoulder of lamb, which we had watched being boned and rolled by the excellent organic butcher whose van frequents the untrendy end of Broadway Market’s food market on a Saturday. We stuffed it with dried apricots (the cupboards are full of dried fruit at the moment, to help me overcome the ’sluggish digestion’ which pregnancy brings on), and basted it with a garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, salt pepper and parsley crust. And served it with roasted parsnips and potatoes and steamed asparagus. I even made my own gravy, which I never do, and it didn’t go lumpy. Followed it with pear and raspberry tart which we’d bought from the always excellent L’Eau a La Bouche, also on Broadway Market. And then lovely coffee and easter egg chocolate, which we accompanied with trashy Sunday night telly.

The excitement of yesterday has relegated me to the sofa again today, while Babyfather has been doing a bit of DIY to finish off the kitchen he put in before he went off to rehab. And for which we went to IKEA on Friday to buy the last few bits and pieces. What a fabulously traditional Easter weekend…

“No one wants to feel like a sausage in a sausage factory. And you certainly wouldn’t want that when it comes to eyecare. At Dolland and Aitchison we prefer to take our time to find out what you really need. And what you don’t. And we promise to treat you like a person. Not a sausage. D&A. We see eyecare differently.”

This is the voiceover of an ad currently running on the telly. It accompanies animated images of a man who gets unwillingly pulled into a factory, wrapped in a sausage skin, and fitted with new glasses. On leaving, he meets a woman who opens a briefcase out of which grows an office, who then fits him with glasses.

Am I alone in wondering what the relevance is?

I was delighted to hear this quote yesterday, made by Norman Kember having been freed after over 100 days in captivity, especially since Tom Ford’s murder a couple of weeks ago had made the situation look ever bleaker. And by the sounds of it, the SAS team led a rescue mission worthy of the most exciting episode of 24, and I am indulging in some Friday morning work displacement by pleasantly daydreaming some Jack Bauer-style fantasies about the operation mounted to effect the rescue.

So far, Messrs Blair, Straw and Reid have issued statements making political mileage out of the brave rescue, the months of covert surveillance and intelligence work which the undoubtedly heroic team undertook. More politicians will undoubtedly jump in soon to help celebrate the release. Which makes me recall the way that members of the government branded Mr Kember as reckless when he was first captured. Doubtless the taking of hostages has made the already incredibly delicately balanced situation in Iraq even more precarious. But Norman Kember, along with people like Margaret Hassan, whose years of humanitarian work in the area led to her death at the hands of kidnappers eager to reap their own mileage, seems to me to have genuinely campaigned for the good of the Iraqi people. The oft-misquoted Burke quote, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing’ springs to mind as a justification of their actions.

His wife, Pat, made a touching statement on a New Zealand radio station, saying that she felt he had been ‘a bit silly’ to go to Iraq. Kember is a life-long peace activist, who first made a pacifist stand when he refused to do national service in the army, choosing instead to work in a hospital. Despite the danger which he knew it might place him in, he felt he had to go to Iraq to try and make a difference. All people who believe in freedom should laud him, and any suggestion of him having brought this on himself should be avoided. The news of his release will be a huge relief to those who caused a situation in Iraq which necessitates people like him to try and make a stance. The hypocrisy of their claiming it as their victory is heightened by the fact that the news sits on so many newspapers next to the headline that Bush is predicting at least another 3 years of occupation by US forces in Iraq.

Excuse me as I venture today into the realms of the sentimental…

The other day, before going to the cinema to see the ‘ok in an “I wouldn’t watch it again” kind of a way’ Oscar winning South African film Tsotsi, and whilst eating a mixed grill in the ‘best Turkish grill in London’ that I like to call lambland with RawSausages and Genius, we were discussing my latest bout of pregnancy related discomfort, and he asked me if I had enjoyed my pregnancy at all.

Which made me stop and think.

My pregnancy book divides chapters into months of the pregnancy. And at the beginning of each month, I have read the next chapter to be prepared for what could be coming up. Babyfather commented in my first trimester that if we read of a possible symptom in the book, I was bound to have it. And it does seem to have been a textbook ‘confinement’.

In the eight months since conception, I have experienced (in vaguely chronological order): morning sickness; constipation; food aversions; food cravings; a migraine which lasted a week; anaemia; loss of appetite; dizziness; erratic emotional outbursts; fatigue; muscular pain in the abdomen; aching bones in the pubis and pelvis; groin pain; swollen ankles after flying; increasing back pain; swollen wrists leading to carpel tunnel syndrome, pins and needles in my hands, and the inability to wear my rings; worse constipation and an outbreak of piles; inability to sleep at night due to the discomforts listed above and the fact that my now mammoth belly is in the way; and most recently, extreme terror over the idea of giving birth. In addition, I have suffered greatly with travelling on public transport – the tube making first trimester nausea unbearable, and the rudeness of people who don’t offer seats to visibly pregnant women having more than once led to me bursting into tears on the number 38 (including this morning: what happened to the English being a well-mannered nation?) Moving house and problems at work have meant that my stress levels have shot up, and worrying that the stress is hurting my baby has compounded this.

Not planning a pregnancy, I wasn’t in great physical condition when I conceived, with my fractured coccyx in particular having added to my discomfort. If I were to do it again (after all this!) I would ensure that I got healthy first to try and avoid as much of that list as I could.

But it only took me a couple of seconds of thinking before I answered RawSausages in the affirmative. When I told Blonde my news, before Babyfather and I had decided whether we were going to go ahead with the pregnancy, she told me ‘no one ever regretted having a baby, and lots of women have regretted getting rid of an unborn one’. And despite all of my concerns and fears, despite all of the discomfort, I am sure that what is about to happen to me will be the most rewarding thing I have done. I just hope that I am able to do my child justice.

The Queen of Cakes and I have an ongoing ‘dysfunctional family of the week’ mantle which gets passed back and forth depending on levels of jaw-dropping behaviour in our respective families, (she will excuse me for commenting that she currently wears this, as her brother knowingly tried to set her up with a man last week who, it turned out, is friends with the men who murdered her sister’s husband a year and a half ago) and I commented to her yesterday that my own little offshoot of my family is already in danger of being a regular wearer of this mantle, and one of the members hasn’t even been born yet. So I am going to spend the next few weeks trying very seriously to work out how best to give my child a stable, loving environment amidst all the uncertainty of its immediate environment and all the ‘evilitude’ of the wider world.