Love... And Sleepless Nights MAY 2012 by Nick Spalding

hovering over the table in one white knuckle. ‘Do I look like I want a visuvio?
    ‘I’m pretty sure you ordered a visuvio, madam.’
    Oh God.
    Somebody kill me. Kill me now.
    ‘Really?!’ A few heads turn to look at us. ‘I’m a pregnant woman, you cock . Do you think a pregnant woman would want to eat something really spicy ?’
    ‘I have no idea madam.’ The poor man is now looking decidedly scared.
    ‘Oh, you have no idea? Tell me, did your mother have any children that lived?’
    Ouch .
    That’s a bad one, even for angry Laura.
    ‘I’m sorry madam,’ he says, trying to recover the situation. ‘I will take this away and get you what you wanted.’
    ‘Too late!’ she screams and stabs the fork into the middle of the visuvio, narrowly missing the waiter’s hand as he goes to pick it up. ‘My husband and I are leaving.’
    ‘We are? But I wanted a pizza.’
    The look Laura gives me contains daggers, swords, machine guns, land mines and at least one inter-continental ballistic nuclear missile.
    I get up, resigned to eating sodding toast again for dinner.
    Laura storms out of the restaurant, pausing only to lean over a young couple near the window, who are waiting for their meals as well. ‘You won’t get what you ordered you know!’ she barks at them, tearing them both from the romantic reverie they’d obviously been enjoying. ‘If you ordered a quattro staggioni, don’t be surprised if he brings out a plate of fucking vermicelli!’
    I grab one of Laura’s arms and usher her quickly out of the front door.
    I have a feeling we won’t be returning to this particular restaurant any time in the near future.
     
    We ended up traipsing around the 24 hour Asda looking for frozen pizzas.
    I picked up a four seasons for me and a ham and cheese for Laura. Both look like they’re made of cardboard, and will probably taste much the same.
    It’s only when I get to the self service counter that I realise my wife is no longer with me.
    When I do find her ten minutes later, I have to chase her up the aisle to get the bottle of Cillit Bang out of her hand before she takes a swig and earns herself a night in casualty.

 
     
     
    Laura’s Diary
    Friday, October 4th
     
     
    Dear Mum,
     
    It’s impossible.
    Completely and utterly impossible .
    I look down at the enormous bump in front of me and there is NO WAY I can squeeze its contents out of my vagina.
    It’s ridiculous!
    What am I, a reticulated python?
    Intellectually I know it’s perfectly possible, otherwise the human race wouldn’t exist, but there’s a gigantic mental block in my head that simply can’t accept it on a visceral level.
    I can see why so many women elect to have a caesarean.
    In the last few days I’ve started to have not what I’d call panic attacks – but definitely panic ‘incidents’ that come and go quite at random.
    I’ll be behind the counter at work thinking about nothing in particular, when this little voice will pipe up: ‘ That baby’s head is going to wreck your under carriage .’
    …and I’ll spend the next ten minutes frozen in fear, until a customer snaps me out of it with a question about mint thins.
    On top of that there’s the whole bringing up another human being for the next twenty years part of the equation. The sheer responsibility of it threatens to crush the life out of me.
    How the hell do these women squeeze out four or five of the little sods?
    I know that some of them (the Housing Authority kind, who look up to Kim Kardashian and believe everything they read in The Sun) have babies so they can get benefits from the government - and thus never have to trouble themselves with finding a job.
    I just can’t get my head around that.
    No amount of government handouts could ever persuade me that it’s worth having my lady garden stretched to breaking point, and my life completely taken over by a miniature person with incontinence and no volume control.
    I spoke of my concerns (oh, alright I cried