The barren woman's hate list - item #2: smug tickertape things

By this I mean those wretched, bastard tickers that pregnant women and new mums insist on having at the end of every piece of email correspondence or forum post they submit.

Most of the tickers chart how many weeks pregnant its owner is, and are illustrated with insipid pictures of bunnies and butterflies and other such girly shite.

As the pregnancy progresses and the ticker owner's fervour grows, they can even be adorned with photos of the baby in the womb. Bah.

Even worse are the tickers charting how old the bloody baby is after the birth. My question to the women who use these is: Where do you plan to stop? It's all very well notifying your every last acquaintance that "My baby is 10 weeks and 2 days and 4 hours and 18 minutes and 42 precious cutesy seconds old", but what's the cut-off point? Can we look forward, in a few years' time, to alerts such as "My baby had his first wet dream today" or "My baby's divorce papers came in the post this morning"?

So here's my pledge to you all, my fledgling blog community: if I ever do manage to conceive a baby, I will never - mark this, EVER - create a ticker or anything similar with which to festoon this blog, my emails, or any other piece of correspondence I care to dispatch.

And while we're on the subject, I shall never send any round-robin emails containing graphic, too-much-information slideshows of my scan photos, the labour and birth, me breastfeeding or baby's first dump to every last contact in my address book either. That's a promise.

Any mums or pregnant ladies who may have stumbled on this bilious and rage-filled blog might also like to heed a bit of friendly advice. Before you send an email that includes a ticker, stop to think for just one second of any friends you have who are or may be trying for a baby. Just consider their feelings and delete the ticker in your messages to them - it won't kill you, and it'll have the double Brucie bonus of meaning they won't want to kill you either.