Follow up... (and Saturday Sky)
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin:
Once upon a time I was a student at university in Manchester. While there I heard a story about a friend of a friend of a friend. Xanthe* failed her 2nd year exams and dropped out. She maintained contact with some of her friends who noticed that she had put on a lot of weight, and were concerned that she was depressed and comfort-eating. One weekend in the holidays she went to stay with Matilda**. Matilda woke in the middle of one night to realise that Xanthe had just given birth to a baby boy. After phoning for an ambulance and getting Xanthe sorted out, Matilda then had to phone Xanthe’s parents to inform them that they were grandparents. No-one had had any idea that there was a baby on the way. (Apparently she had even gone to the doctor’s suffering with swollen ankles, and he hadn’t thought to ask.)
Wind forward a few years…
The beginning of a new academic year. New colleagues start in the dept. We get chatting – it turns out that Lisa was at the same university as me, at the same time as me, in the same hall of residence as my friend. (Remember Xanthe was the friend of a friend of a friend… ) So I ask her if she remembers the above story. It turns out that she does, she’s still in contact with Xanthe who now has an 18 year-old son who is applying to Cambridge University. She’s now married and has two more children. (And she went back to university and finished her degree course and later qualified as a teacher.)
I love happy endings.
Speaking of happy endings – following our trailer debacle it became obvious that we needed two things – a new camera, and another mobile phone. (You can see where this is going, right?)
So yes, I now have a pretty red phone, and it takes pictures – so here is our extremely dull and grey Saturday Sky!
*Names have been changed – and Xanthe is such a fun name…
**Matilda was Ruth’s “bump name”
five comments:
THat’s a wild story! Great happy ending.Our sky looks similar. I wonder if I’ll be brave enough to step outside to take the picture!
Mary de B () (link) - 02 September '06 - 16:56
Your Saturday sky is lovely, I wish ours looked like that.Wow, what a wild story! More than apocryphal evidently. Nice that it seems to have ended so well.
Carrie K () (link) - 02 September '06 - 21:51
I remember this!Isn’t it incredible how someone can be pregnant and not know that they are? I have known it to happen twice. A friend of a friend experienced tummy pains on a train into London, got off at Bristol, was taken to hospital and gave birth!! She thought that her slight weight gain had been because she was drinking too much beer!!! Happy healthy baby, now 5 years old!!!
Big Ruth () (link) - 03 September '06 - 16:36
What a fab story. Although it’s beyond me that someone doesn’t know she’s pregnant…Daisy () (link) - 03 September '06 - 19:16
Hooray for new means of communication and photography…When we were in the Cotswolds, the girl whose parents’ garden backed on to ours did a Xanthe – in her bath one Saturday night. The reaction of her father was what alerted us to the fact…the air was not just faintly blue, but positively navy. None of us had even noticed she was larger…
Kathryn () (link) - 04 September '06 - 16:27
