The perils of labour...

The average gestation period for a newborn baby is 280 days or 40 weeks. A pregnancy is considered full-term if the baby is delivered between 37 and 42 weeks. Pregnancy is never easy with mother suffering back pains, morning sickness, irrational behaviour, louping hormones, weepy moments followed by shouty psychopathic episodes that cause fear in all witnesses, then there's the need for attention, bizarre tastes in food and strange feelings of doubt and misgiving. 

All of which serves to remind me that the election for the next Scottish Parliament is a mere thirty-eight weeks away. 

We've already seen the first volley of irrational behaviour from the Labour midwife Douglas Maddox in today's Scotsman wherein he claims that according to unnamed sources the SNP are planning on ditching the Tartan Overlord and are seeking an National-Labour coalition headed by Mrs Nicola Sturgeon and Mr Ian Gray to keep out the nasty Lib Dems and Tories from controlling both Westminster and Holyrood. Yep, I checked April's about the eight month period, when mother is out of breath and regretting the night of lust and that one last glass of Lambrini.

No doubt between now and May 5th we'll see the button of fantasy politics being turned up way past 11. The trimester period about 12 weeks in is usually about the most worrying time for mothers, particularly the fear of miscarriage. So round about the end of November we'll see the beginning of some pampering behaviour. Scottish politicians will have already booked the Christmas party, recess is looming, holidays in the sun booked etcetera. To add further succour to the Labour, our matronly media will start to publish polls telling us that Labour are at last 20 points ahead in the polls and that anyone who was thinking of voting anything other than Labour is at least two rusks short of a healthy breakfast.

When parliament returns in mid January and nothing gets done until February, we'll start to see mother put on almost Bailliesque proportions of weight...

 

This is normally a time to relax take it easy, start planning for the newborns arrival at the end of term. Unfortunately Labour are bound to be in a bit of a flap, running around reminding elderly people of the importance of postal ballots, importing activists from down south, checking the veracity of what their candidates are saying on election pamphlets, confirming they live where they say they do and so on.

Prior to delivery, fathers expectation of fun with the nipple cream usually leads to a smacked dish and an overwhelming feeling of being left out of it all. That's where Gordon Brown comes in, no doubt he'll be wheeled around old folks homes, social clubs and empty shopping centres with Ian Gray, boring passers by with how he saved the world and how he can see Edinburgh from his house.

Come delivery day, no doubt the return to hand counting and the consignment to the bin marked 'useless' of those Neil Kinnock E-rig-a-vote machines will mean that the baby parliament will be delivered in the early hours. Given that by this time Labour will have had four years of positive matronly media massages and the SNP four years of shitty nappies, the electorate will finally have their say. Will it count? Will the establishment of civil servants, quangocrats and worthy Scottish journalists really want the reality of Labour out of power in Scotland for an eight year period? 

It's going to be a difficult pregnancy with lots of scares along the way, the powers that are will stop at nothing to return Labour to the potty, where they can continue to dole out dollops of largesse to their friends. 

My only fear is that the Parliament gives birth to something like this bundle of conradictions.