If you’ve just welcomed a baby into your life, prepare to have the following question asked of you at least eight-thousand nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine thousand million billion times:
“What weight were they?”
So you tell them, they nod and they smile a dreamy little far-off smile, and you think to yourself: ‘What the fuck significance does that particular measurement hold for you, my inquisitive friend?’
Why has this question become de rigueur in discussions about babies? Seriously, I want to know. The information is neither important nor interesting; furthermore, the question could be insensitive if the baby being asked about is either over or under weight. I guess what people really want to know when they ask that question is whether or not the baby is healthy. Here’s a little pointer: if you’re having a calm and pleasant conversation with a mother about her new baby, then it’s probably safe to assume that the baby is healthy. Otherwise the mother would be a depressed husk weeping at your feet.
If you’re an asker of that particular question, I’d like to interrogate your motivation: are you compiling statistics for the ONS? Do you have a giant ever-expanding graph on your bedroom wall showing the comparative weights of all babies within a 40-mile radius, which you pore over like some drooling serial killer in the dead of night? Are you planning on cooking these fucking babies?
“8 pounds? Cool, that’ll be gas mark five for forty minutes.”
Is it a boasting thing, like when men get together to compare battle scars? Or is there a maternal hierarchy based upon birth-weight-related agony?
“So what was your wee one’s weight? Six pounds? Huh, that’s not giving birth, sweetheart, that’s shitting out a Malteser. My son was 11 pounds, hen. Wee bastard’s noggin ripped my vag apart like a mace smashing through a paper bag. You don’t know your kid’s born.”
I’m going to start asking for evermore obscure measurements from new parents: “What was the diameter of your daughter’s ankle? How mathematically spherical was her head? Can you give me her hand-span? I’m writing a book about children’s hands.” That’ll put a stop to this nonsense.
The Maths of Mort
Staying loosely on the topic of maths and measurements, I’m reminded of an expression my mum was fond of using in relation to a big body of water near her home-town of Drumchapel in Glasgow. It was a canal, or a reservoir, or a flooded quarry pit, or something, I can’t remember exactly (I could phone her to clarify, but that feels too much like proper journalism to me, and that clearly isn’t part of this blog’s mission statement). But she used to say to me, ‘Oh Jamie. So many kids died in that water…’
Wait for it…
‘… that it wisnae even funny anymore.’
How many kids had to drown, before the people of Glasgow stopped laughing? What a wonderfully unfortunate turn of phrase. I never knew there was an acceptable level of dead-kid titterage, or such strict rules and limits. This is a minefield, people. We need to quantify and clarify. Luckily, I got together with Stephen Hawking and Carol Vorderman and put together a handy little graph.
First of all, let’s address the deficiencies. Unfortunately, the graph can’t tell us the weight of the children. Thankfully, the graph can tell us that nine is the cut-off before laughing at drowned kids ‘isnae even funny any more’. You now know, extrapolating from the data, that if you happen to find yourself in the East End of Glasgow regaling the occupants of a rowdy pub with hilarious stories of oxygen-starved, water-clogged kids, that big Shug and his pals will laugh along with you, slapping your back and even buying you pints, only up until the mention of the tenth drowned child, after which point you’ll probably have your teeth knocked out. Presumably then a gang of hairy welders will attempt to rape you with a succession of upturned bar stools. And, worst of all, you won’t get any Ferrero Rochers.
I’m here to help.
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