Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

Another New York birth centre, the Brooklyn Birthing Center, has fallen victim to the same catastrophic rise in insurance costs that scuttled the Elizabeth Seton Childbearing Center: read about it here. As that article notes, only one birth centre remains in the wider New York metropolitan area: the Morris Heights Childbearing Center, which is federally funded and insured and thus insulated from the upheavals in liability insurance (and vulnerable only to the whims of government funding and policy).

Nothing is ever certain, particularly when it comes to the well-understood but individually mysterious process of birth. You can hope and plan all you want, and get something completely different. Both you and the baby are at the mercy of forces literally beyond the control of either of you, although your first task as a mother is to prepare yourself as best you can to navigate the uncharted rapids ahead. At the same time, in a very important sense, birth is the baby's journey. It is the baby who is making its way into the world, and acquiescing to the process is a preliminary lesson in accepting the invigorating chaos - and the utter otherness - that a child brings into your well-ordered life. Among my friends, I've heard of (and in a couple of cases witnessed) labours that were serene, chaotic, sudden, long-awaited, traumatic, ecstatic; labours that were over as quickly as they began, that lasted longer than seemed bearable at the time, that ended in emergency C-sections, that consisted entirely of planned, absolutely necessary C-sections. I know people who've had difficult birth-centre births, and perfectly fine hospital births. Nothing is ever certain.

Nonetheless, it was sobering the other night to visit Elizabeth Seton for what will be the last time and sit in a room full of women due to have their babies any day now, as they absorbed the news that their carefully chosen birth context -- the one thing of which they could be certain, until labour began -- had been extinguished by the stroke of a pen at some insurance company HQ. Some of these women will choose home-birth, which is the closest one can get to a birth center birth. Others will move with some of the Elizabeth Seton midwives to the temporary rooms at St Vincent's, or seek out other hospitals, where they will be subject to the hospital protocols that limit the number of supporters in the room, define visiting hours, accelerate the speed with which artificial methods of induction are applied when labour slows down, and mandate the frequency of internal exams (see a list here of the major differences in St Vincent's birth protocols).

For those interested in learning more about the dubious rationales and cascading effects of these apparently minor differences, Henci Goer's must-read The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth is a partial (pro-natural birth) but impeccably researched and annotated guide to studies of the impact of various medical interventions.

More reading: an older article in the New York Post that lists the Soho Midwives Center as another casualty of the insurance rise. And although my focus here has been on midwifery in New York, it's not just New York, and it's not just natural-birthing facilities that are feeling the pain -- the crisis is a much, much wider one and it's been coming for a while.

Obstetricians all over the country are finding it too expensive to renew their insurance policies, leaving some areas - especially rural areas - without any pregnancy-related services at all. The profession as a whole is suffering. (These last two links were found at Overlawyered, which fair froths at the mouth detailing particularly outrageous liability suits in every field -- their medical section is here). So which medical or diagnostic practice will disappear next? Mammograms?

Tort reform -- limiting the circumstances and dollar amounts of liability suits -- seems to be the only answer, although funnily enough the trial lawyers don't necessarily agree... At MedPundit, an anonymous doctor replies, and links to this fascinating story of one woman's experience with ambulance-chasing lawyers. None of this is news, of course. But none of it is good news either. And don't even get me started on the latest news about the alarming concentration of harmful substances in the breast milk of North Americans... it'll just make me want to sue someone, dammit.

I'm back! Back here at Public Address, as well as back in the USA, the land of big bad food and lots of other big bad things. I have tons of blogs about the New Zealand trip stacked up like circling planes just ready to land, but I'm going to hold them all back in favour of a distressing bit of news that greeted me on my return to New York.

If I write "the Elizabeth Seton Childbearing Center is closing on September 1st" that probably won't mean much to most readers. So try this instead: the only place in Manhattan – short of having a home-birth -- where you can have a baby without being automatically hooked up to the machine that goes "ping", the only place where you will be attended by expert midwives and loving nurses who assume that you can handle labour pain without the services of an anaesthetist, the only place where you are allowed to give birth in the bath if you want to, the only place where you can have as many people in the room with you as you want (including one woman who famously had her entire church choir singing throughout the labour and greeting the baby with a song), the only place where, after the birth, you and the baby and your partner and anyone else you like can snuggle up in a king-size bed on fresh sheets and sleep and get to know each other, the only place where you can order in pizza or scones or pad thai or whatever you like from your favourite little place in the Village for that first, ravenous post-birth snack… In short, the only place I would have considered having Busytot, and the place where he made his first appearance nearly two years ago – this place is shutting its doors.

With two weeks notice. Which is distressing enough for me, but even more so for the many women who expected to give birth there in the next few months, including my friend (and Busytot's first babysitter) Aline. Like me, she's a long way from home; like me she comes from a place that still believes women's bodies can do more or less what they're designed to do; like me, she wants to have her first baby in a place that has all the love, comfort and care of a home-birth but also the necessary equipment and access to a hospital if needs be.

For thirty years, the Elizabeth Seton Childbearing Center has been offering all of this to New York women -- three or four hundred of them a year -- including those on public assistance, and non-citizens like me, as long as we have health insurance. It's a lovely wee place down on 14th St: three nicely appointed birthing rooms with big beds, patchwork quilts on the walls, rocking chairs and big spa baths for labouring in. It's also home to an ob/gyn practice, and to a set of meeting rooms where parents and babies come to talk and organize: it hosts breastfeeding workshops, post-natal depression support groups, baby development seminars, bilingual playgroups, mother and baby yoga. And tonight, it will host a meeting – possibly the last -- about what, if anything, can be done to keep the centre open. St Vincent's Hospital, just around the corner (where you transfer if things aren't working out) has picked up the ball and are converting a couple of rooms for use by Elizabeth Seton clients due over the next few months. But after that, it's anyone's guess.

What's closing it down? Money. Specifically, liability laws and the correspondingly exorbitant insurance charges. For the last few years, the centre has been paying half a million dollars a year in liability insurance. That's somewhere between one and two thousand dollars per birth, just in case something goes wrong. It's horrifically expensive, but granted, any birth involves two potential victims of medical malpractice, and the statute of limitations is something like 21 years so these things can catch up with you long after the fact. There's a twisted capitalist logic at work: without an adequate social safety net of any kind, your only hope of recovering from what they call medical misadventure is to sue the pants off someone – no matter how many other people suddenly find themselves chilly around the nether regions as a result.

(On a side note, I had a moment of culture shock, while I was home, reading an update on the young woman who was badly burned during a routine C-section in a New Zealand hospital last year. She was sanguine about the experience, sympathetic to the medical staff, insisted that it was an accident that could have happened to anyone, and was thrilled by the support she'd received from the hospital – including a birthday cake and some rosehip oil – as well as the wider public. No plans to sue. That’s a story you would never, ever, ever read in an American newspaper, not in a million years).

So, half a million dollars constituted a massive chunk of the annual budget, probably more than what the midwives themselves cost. Weeks ago, the insurer informed the centre -- out of the blue -- that the insurance bill for out-of-hospital births would more than double [Note added 3/9/03: according to a letter from the Center, this was a two-stage process -- first the existing insurer informed them that it would cease to cover out-of-hospital births, then enquiries to other insurance companies produced the following figures]. For the Elizabeth Seton Center to stay insured would cost $1.2 million a year. That's about $4000 per birth; a totally unsustainable amount of money. [Figures updated 31/8/03; an earlier report had mentioned a $2 million premium but $1.2 million is equally unaffordable] I don't know if or how these increases will apply to home-birth midwives too; if they do, women here – in the largest city in what we are constantly told is the greatest country in the world – will have no option but to give birth in hospitals, which is very convenient for the highly paid obstetricians and anesthesiologists, and promises a corresponding increase in C-sections, episiotomies, and all those other interventions that add up to money for the doctors and extended recovery time for birthing women and their babies. Let me repeat: no option. Talk about tyranny in the land of the "free".

What will be lost? Not just a functional group of five talented midwives and their support staff, and the three beautifully equipped birthing rooms with extra space for pacing around in. It's also the very existence of a place that assumes birth to be a largely uncomplicated experience, and which has helped shift hospital practices to a more woman-friendly model, including the construction of special birthing suites, the re-introduction of rooming-in as an option, and permitting midwives to practice on the premises. It's the loss of a middle option that has made hospital birth more humane and home-birth more thinkable (that's my plan for next time). At a time when home-birth is the norm in Holland, and is being encouraged as a matter of public health policy in Wales, once again the United States is swimming against the tide. This feels like the end of an era that has hardly begun.

Some background reading: there are articles about the closure in both the New York Times (free registration required) and Newsday. The last chapters of Peggy Vincent's excellent midwife memoir Babycatcher give an overview of how the insurance industry has ravaged the business of homebirth in America. Also check out Ayun Halliday's book The Big Rumpus, her hair-raising account of child-raising on a budget in the big city: the chapter on the waterbirth of her son Milo is a raucously engaging tribute to the Elizabeth Seton Center and its midwives, as well as a nail-bitingly exact depiction of an ordinary and miraculous birth. And Naomi Wolf, in Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood -- a no-holds-barred indictment of the American way of birth -- set aside a chapter for a warm and eloquent description of the Center and its activities, concluding that what this country needs is more places like Elizabeth Seton. Alas, it's even less likely to get them now.

I remember trekking down to the Center for the first of our birth classes on the Saturday after September 11, 2001. It was the first train I'd taken in several days, and the first time I'd been outside our immediate neighbourhood since that too-blue Tuesday. Any major exertion led to premature contractions, something I was eager to avoid with six weeks still to go, so I was moving carefully and deliberately. We came up out of the subway to a wall of posters of missing people, and a cluster of police officers marking the edge of the frozen zone. A gap in the skyline down Seventh Ave. A smoky bitter smell. The mood was somber, morose, nervous, dissociated. Walking, or I should say waddling, the hundred feet or so to the door of the birth centre, I tripped and fell. No one moved to help me, least of all the armed policeman standing a few feet away.

At the birth centre, a kind nurse found a band-aid for my bleeding knees, and we joined the class. The tutor was barely able to hold herself together, but led us through the basics of breastfeeding and handed out realistic life-sized baby dolls so we could practice holding them properly. I felt stupid, but I clutched my little brown doll for dear life and tried to concentrate on the class, tried not to think about how far from home I felt, how difficult it would be to get on a plane and flee. The next day, the same journey downtown, a different teacher, a different group, and we prepared to talk about the mechanics of labour and how best to comfort oneself through it without resorting to drugs. The mood was tremulous, brittle; we were all pulling ourselves along some sort of mental handrail to get through these last weeks. I found myself thinking in clichés. What kind of a world was this to bring a child into? A child who hadn't asked to be born? The hospital round the corner treated exhausted rescue workers and burned survivors of the twin towers, and we were busy talking about hot water bottles and ice cubes and cups of tea.

As we went round the circle introducing ourselves, one of the other heavily pregnant women said that she'd been stopped on the street that morning by a man who told her she was beautiful, that a pregnant woman was "a walking sign of hope." Under other circumstances we might have scoffed at this greeting-card turn of phrase, but in that moment it had a ring of authenticity and, strangely, salvation. It was all right to be pregnant. It was more than all right, it was necessary. Erica, our tutor, wrote down the phrase and put it up on the noticeboard out the front of the center, where it was still hanging six weeks later as we tucked Busytot into his baby carseat and carried him out to the taxi.

I don't know if the notice is still there. But if pregnant women are walking signs of hope, then the Elizabeth Seton Birth Center is the Grand Central Station of hope. I'm just not sure that hope alone will save it. If you're a New York state resident, you can sign this online petition. And if not, do you know of a kind millionaire who can help keep the centre open, while the rest of us scramble to lobby for changes to the insurance industry and the liability laws, so that the welfare of mothers and babies can be the bottom line?

In what is either a stroke of brilliantly understated humour or a total marketing failure, Hamilton greets visitors with a billboard bearing the wistful civic slogan "Hamilton... more than you expect." As slogans go, it's an improvement on "Hamilton: Fountain City" which, when adopted back in the 70s, required the immediate construction of several extra fountains to justify the designation. Lexically, it certainly beats "Hamilton... just what you'd expect," although for my money, "Hamilton... more than you suspect" would have had a more alluring and mysterious ring to it. Anyway, it's catchier and a tad less corporate than "Hamilton... exceeding your expectations since 1877."

Leaving town, the back of the same billboard simply bids you "Farewell/Haere ra," which is a bit of a missed opportunity. I'd expect at the very least a cheery follow-up on the original assertion. Like, "Hamilton... what did you expect?" You could even have a wee booth distributing customer satisfaction surveys or conducting exit interviews. Age, sex, country of origin, and a few multi-choice questions, like "Did Hamilton exceed your expectations (a) quite a lot, (b) somewhat, (c) barely, (d) not at all?"

I'd have to say, the underselling approach works: after spending large chunks of the last couple of weeks in Expectation City, I can unequivocally answer (a). Especially once we found the play equipment and relocated the art museum. Down by the very pretty lake, Busytot cut his teeth (as it were) on one of those frighteningly unreconstructed playgrounds that make New Zealand kids the tough little beasts that they are. I stood to one side, trying not to make like a manic micro-managing Manhattan mama, while my little fellow wended his way through a series of finger-chopping, leg-breaking, head-donging obstacles all the way to the wide-open summit, where it's only a two-metre drop to the rubberized surface below (the sole apparent concession to liability laws).

I'm alarmed at the extent to which I've absorbed the risk-averse vibe of the excessively regulated jungle-gyms in the so-called urban jungle of New York. Only a week earlier I'd scoffed at a witty article in the Herald that, I thought, overstated the link between the relative timidity of North Americans and their buffered, babyproofed playgrounds. But after a few mornings down at the swings, I'm persuaded… Sir Edmund Hillary didn't get where he is today by not stubbing a few toes and breaking the occasional arm. Which may have been what inspired the particularly stroppy mother in Pt Chev the other day, who, when her youngest child hopped off the centrifugal merry-go-round thing as his sturdier brothers cranked it up to warp speed, yelled "Get back on there, ya bloody wuss!"

Anyway, after hauling Busytot away from the water's edge, where he spent a happy half hour feeding the ducks, geese, and small native birds, we made for the always impressive Waikato Museum of Art and History (no link, as it lacks an appropriately beautiful or up-to-date website... oh all right, go see for yourself). We had a bicultural agenda: we wanted to renew our acquaintance with Te Winika, the beautifully restored Tainui waka, and to grab a decent coffee in the café. Alas, the major art wing was closed for restoration and we'd missed Robyn Kahukiwa and Len Lye; but good luck, there was Te Winika in all her glory; and even better luck, down in the one wee exhibition of contemporary art, we stumbled across the weekly mother-and-baby group.

Busytot and his dad joined forces with the kiddies' group while I explored the exhibit. A security guard hovered nervously, not sure who was less trustworthy -- the group of under twos playing quietly with arty toys at a safe distance from most of the sculptures and paintings, or the dodgy looking art fan who leaned a millimeter over the white line to see round the back of one of the sculptures. It was an intriguing piece by an overseas-based New Zealander, consisting of a suitcase full of assorted items – photos, objects, signs -- to be arranged ad hoc by the gallery staff. As the gallery notes explained, ponderously and redundantly, it was all about being overseas and dragging your "cultural baggage" around.

It was a cute concept, or should I say conceit, but for me the level of craftsmanship and attention to detail left something to be desired. If you're going to wad up a ball of tinfoil to represent a planet, it could at least be symmetrical. There's no such thing as a "fractal black hole." And the picture of Stephen Hawking with his eyes poked out seemed gratuitously nasty and just plain weird. A couple of the other pieces made me want to poke my own eyes out, with their yawn-inducing obviousness. My vote for best bang for material buck went to the wit who had stapled a length of vintage orange and brown printed fabric onto a thick wooden frame and slapped it on the wall. The curatorial notes instructed me to wonder if the piece was a mattress or perhaps a couch, which might explain why I dutifully nearly fell asleep on my feet while looking at it.

Always one to applaud and defend smart-assery in art, I was beginning to wonder if I'd suddenly tipped over into Hamish Keith territory and would never again like anything made by anyone under thirty out of cunningly rearranged salvagings from the latest inorganic rubbish collection. Thank god, then, for the centerpiece of the exhibition: the genuinely witty, well-made, and subtle (apart from its silly title) "HYPERREAL TOOLBOX FOR THE REINVENTION OF A TRANSGLOBAL EMPIRE IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE?" by Dave Stewart, which nattily deconstructs and reimagines the iconic crate of beer. It's classic. It won a big prize. I'll drink to that. Although I can't imagine how it might be displayed in the home of a private collector. You'd have to keep it well away from the fridge.

Thoroughly refreshed, I followed the tots and their groovy mums to the café where, over glasses of feijoa nectar (yum) and some world-class coffee, we outed ourselves as visitors from Manhattan – albeit one of us a Hamilton boy -- merely masquerading as locals. More fool us. It turned out that everyone around the table knew someone who was either living in New York or had just moved back, which in a sense made us thoroughly local… in fact, you might say, more Hamilton than you expect.

It’s good to be home. Especially with the spring-like weather that passes for winter in Auckland. I hardly need a coat at all, although I always forget the particular chill of July and August mornings... It’s certainly a novelty for Busytot -- accustomed as he is to central heating -- to find himself sleeping in a room that has condensation on the inside of the windows. Not to mention waking up with feet like little blocks of ice, even with socks on.

But a quick snuggle in the big bed with the grandparents soon fixes that, and after a week he’s already acclimatized to the point of running around bare-footed inside and out. He even paddled in the sea at Mission Bay yesterday, while several slightly stauncher children actually stripped off and plunged in. Poor urban creature: he gazed out at the sparkling Waitemata, with magnificent Rangitoto on the horizon and views all the way out to the Barrier, then looked down at the beach in front of him and pronounced, with great satisfaction, "Sandpit!"

I am happy to report that the journey from New York to Auckland was accomplished entirely without the help of drugs, in any form, for any of us (unless you count the myriad ill-advised chocolate treats I dutifully confiscated from the toddler's tray to gorge on while he slumbered). JFK to LAX coincided with nap-time, and after a good night’s sleep in LA, the long haul to Auckland didn’t seem quite so daunting after all.

The California stopover was a stroke of brilliance: not only did it break the trip nicely, it also gave us all a chance to get into the water and splash around. First with a thoroughly refreshing dip in the hotel pool, and later, a spontaneous dip in the Pacific while on an evening jaunt to the nearest beach. The beach wasn't on the original plan, but we hadn’t quite timed it right to catch the spectacular Getty Museum (and only a mad person would take a toddler to Disneyland) so we took advantage of a free shuttle bus to the quaintly named Manhattan Beach. First stop there was the pier, which stretches out into the sea and provides an excellent vantage point for admiring the surfers and swimmers. "Wanta surf, yeah?" said Busytot (which should have come as a warning).

At the end of the pier is a small aquarium, which offers ominous sounding "Sleep with the Sharks Slumber Parties," as well as something I’d never seen before -- a sort of aquatic petting zoo, a tank full of fish that you could touch (albeit, as the sign said, "gently, with one finger only"). Squadrons of determined children ringed the tank, some of them gingerly stroking the dogfish and rays with one tremulous finger, others thrusting both hands into the water up to the elbows for the full two-fisted fish-fondling experience; equally, half the fish huddled in fear on the far side of the tank, while the other half fairly leapt out of the water in search of small sticky hands.

Busytot spent a good half an hour leaning precariously over the water touching fish until we dragged him off to walk along the promenade at the top of the beach. The plan was that he would conk out in the stroller. No such luck, so we parked the pushchair and walked down onto the sand. He kept walking, heading down towards the water, a good fifty metres or so away. Plod, plod, plod, like Captain Oates out into the snow.

We shadowed him like bodyguards, and rolled up his trousers as he approached the water. Where he stood happily at the very edge of the surf, watching the waves go in and out. In and out. In and out. In and . . . all of a sudden he was running OUT with the water at enormous speed! It was one of those six million dollar mum scenarios, with everything happening in slow motion: I chased him, he tripped over, and lay face down in the water while the retreating wave filled his nappy and his nostrils with about half a pound of sand and sea water. I scooped up the now sodden child, who squawked briefly to get the water out of his nose, and then smiled maniacally and said "More swimming?"

Mad child. Luckily we had a spare outfit for him, and the ubiquitous drinking fountain helped wash the sand off. We wandered back to the bus stop along the strand, admiring all the toned and tanned flesh on display. After a series of long northeastern winters you tend to forget that people have limbs, so it’s eye-opening to see them all hanging out and moving around in such naked profusion.

One especially statuesque young specimen caught everybody’s eye: she was wearing a bikini that was the exact manuka-honey shade of her impressively smooth skin, giving the general impression that she was utterly, beautifully nude. Certainly the three older ladies beside us couldn’t take their eyes off her. I couldn't hear exactly what they were mumbling, but made out the words "harlot" and "Babylon" and "if that were my daughter..." I thought she looked delicious. Who was it who said that if she had her life to live over, she'd spend more of her twenties in a bikini? Me too.

So, how are you finding Public Address these days? No really, how are you finding it? Every now and then I have a squiz at the website statistics, which if they were a beauty contest would have a lipstick-smeared and teary-eyed Russell wearing the tiara and the sash, and Chad standing eagerly at his elbow ready to take over the crown should anything prevent Russell from fulfilling his duties. The rest of us are lined up behind them, sucking in our guts and beaming for the cameras. But it's not a beauty contest; it's about reaching readers and hopefully, touching them. In a nice way.

Who are we touching? Some of you we hear from via the handy feedback button on each page, but the website statistics give a rough picture of the other thousands of mystery readers out there. They don't tell us your names or addresses, but they do tell us how many of you stay for less than thirty seconds (a few) and how many linger longer (more than a few). They tell us that more of you read during the week than on the weekends, and more during the day than at night (any correlation with the working week is pure coincidence, and you only read us during tea breaks, of course). Most of you are New Zealanders, or at least your internet service providers are. But there are a fair number of Australians, North Americans and Brits, and a surprising number checking in from Singapore. You do a jolly good job of circulating at our virtual cocktail party, too: most of you make a beeline for Russell -- the hussy! er, I mean, the life and soul of the party -- but you're not too shy to come and chat with me and Debra by the punch bowl, or the lads out on the patio.

So, how exactly are you finding Public Address? The statistics also tell us how some of you get here, by listing both the pages you bounced on over from and, more interestingly, the most common search strings that persuaded a search engine -- usually the less intelligent ones -- to cough up Public Address. This is a mixed bag, of course, because sometimes you're not really looking for us. For everyone who just typed one of our names and "Public Address" into google, we get several who were looking for something completely different. Quite often something completely pervy.

It's a universal phenomenon, sex and the single search engine. A couple of years ago, when my partner and I put Bill Manhire's excellent choose-your-own adventure The Brain of Katherine Mansfield on the web, we noticed that a lot of people who found their way there were looking for information on Katherine Mansfield. If you've checked out the site, you'll know that's not what it's about. But the most lost -- or hopeful -- searcher of them all was the person who typed in "pictures mans bottoms" and found our site at the very top of Yahoo's list (Yahoo must have fixed their algorithm, because sadly that search string doesn't lead straight to us any more). I wonder if they ever did find pictures mans bottoms, or if instead they developed an interest in hypertext fiction on the strength of that chance encounter. Who were they? I pictured an gaggle of eight-year-olds giggling around a momentarily unattended computer; Richard always thought it might perhaps be an elderly Albanian nun who had just figured out how to use a search engine to track down something she'd always wondered about and never managed to find in the public library.

So yes, of those of you who are finding Public Address by happy accident through a search engine, quite a few are basically eight-year-olds and Albanian nuns looking for pictures mans bottoms. But you know we aim to please, even if we can't help with your specific enquiry. An impressive number of people wanted to know what Prince William looked like in his birthday loincloth, a subject I, er, touched on in passing a few weeks ago. I want to know too, so if you come across any pictures, let me know. I think I might have scored a surprise hit with those who were on the lookout for "bulging crotches" and indeed "big bulging crotches," although whoever wanted to know about going "bottomless in public" must have gone away empty-handed.

As did, I suspect, the poor fellow who just wanted to know "how can u enlarge your penis from stuff just around the house." He should probably get in touch with the several enquirers who were interested in "how to make a strawberry cheesecake," as I bet they have some useful kitchen implements to hand. At the very least they might want some help with the stirring, and, word to the wise: a layer of cheesecake mix will add at least half an inch. Whoever wanted "gay mexican cowboys," meet "mission impossible ring tone," dude, and the many people who demanded to know the "pros and cons of prostitution" might want to visit, or perhaps steer clear of, "four floors whores Singapore."

[And nothing to do with search terms, but before I change the subject: I rather enjoyed this fine article on women breaking the perspex ceiling in the sex industry].

It's not just sex and drugs and a fair bit of rock'n'roll that you're after -- there are also straightforward requests for information, including (of all things) public addresses. The people who were hunting for "michael jackson's address so we can write a letter to him" and "peter jackson's address" and especially "classified email addresses of the most richest in europe 2003 guest book" are, alas, dreaming. But hopefully Damian can help the chap who wrote "i want to become a cracker," and a lot of the yoga-related hits probably find what they're looking for from Debra. Chad has many fans, although perhaps the fellow looking for a "muse penis" is not in the end much of a reader. Rob no doubt takes care of the several woebegotten searchers whose dryers just won't heat. Strangely, there are more than a few.

As well as the bulging crotches, I get most of the baby and New York hits, which is no surprise. I'm always happy to help with the "latest on modern parenting," in a laissez faire sort of way, and I wish I could help out the person who wanted a "definition of shoplifting in new york" for the next time Busytot swipes something on the way out of the supermarket. But I sure hope whoever typed "public nuclear shelter ny" doesn't know something the rest of us don't.

I would love to meet whoever was interested in "naenae, history of" since I grew up there. What I can tell you is that according to a fascinating article I read some time ago (in the New Zealand Journal of History, I think), Naenae was something of a model town for state housing, and moreover its shopping centre was designed by a European architect who modelled it after the Piazza San Marco in Venice -- a comparison that I must say had never previously occurred to me. Ah Naenae. We lived at the very top of Seddon St, up near the bush, but my Nana lived in a state house down near the railway right up until she died (ten years ago last month), so I have very fond feelings about those little brick houses on Sladden St. They look and feel like home.

On that note, back to the packing. I hope to blog from Auckland (I hear they even have this internet thing in New Zealand these days) in between catching up with family and friends. Thanks for the travel tips, especially Hana who suggested balloons, and Brian who warned me about the choco-centric kids' meals on Air NZ that had his son thrashing around for hours in a sugar frenzy. I will make it my personal duty to intercept and dispose of anything the least bit chocolatey from Busytot's tray. I think I'm up to the challenge.

Now that I think of it, I should have been suspicious when the agent on the phone, when asked what was in a toddler meal, said happily: "Ooh, just lots of Things Kids Like!" Hold the deep-fried Moro bars and the McMadcow burgers, thanks. We'll make sure to bring some boring sensible snacks to keep the sugar-fuelled air-rage at bay. I wish we could afford to do like the movie star, who, according to friends of friends who shared a flight with her and her kid, handed out DVD players and champagne to everyone in first class to apologise in advance for the screaming child under her arm. More tips always appreciated, and if any business out there wants to sponsor DVD players and champers for the entire cattle-class cabin in return for an effusive mention in this column, I'm all ears. You know how to find me: just click that feedback button at the top right corner of the page, or, if you're feeling lucky, head to your favourite search engine and type "big bulging crotch" or "Prince William birthday loincloth" or even "dazzlingly large bosoms"... you never know what you'll find.