I tried to take a break from LJ there, to concentrate on other writing. But all that happened was I started writing entries longhand in notebooks, which meant it took longer and now I can never find what I'm looking for when I go back over it.

Things have been busy in real life over here. Some people reading this will already know that I'm having a baby in the spring. A baby! A human one. I mean Hannah's doing most of the work, but I certainly contributed in the early stages. There is a lot of excitement and also a shitload of Stuff To Be Done that has kept me pretty busy and a bit frazzled. And because this is France, the whole thing is enveloped in a mountain of administrative challenges requiring a continual supply of paperwork – an attestation de grossesse, registration with some shadowy body called the CAF (something something familiales), and pre-booking a hospital for the actual birth which needs to be done practically as soon as you know you're up the duff.

Despite the fact that we live literally opposite one of Paris's most famous maternity hospitals, Hannah has decided to book us into a ‘more forward-thinking’ clinic on the other side of the city, where we recently sat through a long ‘acclimatisation’ meeting about what our ‘birth plan’ is. We didn't have a birth plan, beyond walking away with a healthy baby, so we just made up some stuff about having a supportive atmosphere which seemed to satisfy them. Hannah is assiduously studying vocab lists of daunting terms like par le siège, amniocentèse, and the ever-essential péridurale. Here she is with her bump, although I should note that some of this is due to third helpings of gluten-free Christmas pudding:



Feeling the little critter kick around inside her is just as astonishing as you'd expect, but also considerably weirder and more...nuanced than I was led to believe. There is a living thing inside her! It still freaks us out quite a lot – as well as providing several intervals of wide-eyed awestruck joy.

The rest of our life is fairly stable and viewed by us with cautious approval, if rarely outright excitement. Work is bubbling along and in the current climate we're happy to have plenty of it. We are trying while we can to enjoy all our quiet evenings in playing Scrabble and watching, on herself_nyc's recommendation, Friday Night Lights which is amazing. Eating out is still a big pleasure for us, but now H is pregnant there's a whole load more stuff she can't eat along with the gluten, meaning the set of edible dishes on the average menu has now shrunk to include little more than an orange juice and the charred, coal-like, bacteria-free remains of what might once have been a steak. The worst thing is that she can't even drink her way through it and has to watch me knocking back vodka martinis every night (we keep getting asked if she has any cravings; I used to say no, but now, more honestly, I say ‘Sancerre’). And France being France, with its 1950s views on gender relations, everyone is suddenly being incredibly nice to her but also irritatingly protective – when she allowed herself to order a small undecaffeinated coffee the other day the waiter refused to serve her. ‘It's all right, we're giving it up for adoption,’ I yelled, in a fury.

It's New Year, so I'm worrying even more than usual about my lack of creativity, and trying to work out how, given my current feeble levels of productivity, I'm ever going to get anything accomplished again in my private life after April when I'll be pretty much flat-out. But hopefully then, I'll have more exciting things to worry about.