Blight Club

Sadly, Gingerbread Man had forgotton the first costume rule of Blight Club.












This morning, Lucy and I decided to forgo the excitement of our weekly music gathering, and traipse along instead to the local Gingerbread group.

For the happily uninitiated amongst you, Gingerbread offers support for the more, erm, alone parenting folk out there. In retrospect, I should probably have joined the second my urine inked its blue truth along the pregnancy test. But, being undeniably stubborn, not to mention flakily hopeful, I've managed to ignore everything and put it off until now.

Useless personality traits aside, another reason for my delay has been, well, unmitigated terror. It's weird and bad and scary enough joining normal baby groups with their tireless renditions of Wind the Bobbin Up (now sadly an absolute favourite of mine, and well deserving of its no. 3 spot in my personal top ten of songs). But the thought of sitting in a room watching 15 or so single women pouring their partnerless bile into tea-cups and dunking their digestives into the bitterness of desertion has never really been up there on my list of things to do before I die.

Fortunately, the envisaged bile-fest was not in evidence this morning. True enough, there was plenty of tea, and there were certainly a fair few women in attendance, but not a single wisp of embittered gossip was to be had. Not even a smidgen: not a single tale of an ex-husband caught "testing" condoms with the next door neighbour; no shared experiences of previous partners flying off for yet another exotic whore tour; and not even the remotest breath of extra-marital breeding in Sainsbury's carpark on dogging Wednesdays.

Ah well. No gossip, just lots of dull advice on housing and benefits instead. Mind you, it does look like they've got a slightly more interesting schedule for the rest of the year, if the "Keep Your Pecker Up" leaflet that I was given is anything to go by:

For example, every third Wednesday there's a tartan-clad outing to Hampstead Heath for a major reenactment of the battle of Colloden. On Thursdays there's a cunningly named "sew and sew" afternoon, which will give me the opportunity to finally finish off that fluorescent, 3-D version of the Bayeux Tapestry that I've been working on (oh to be able to find the right shade of yarn for a popped eyeball!). And to top the activities off, every second Friday, the group apparently have ten sambucca shots each and take it in turns to pin the tale on Stephen Hawking.

Truly, I can't wait.