Philobiblon

…every woman is different. Annalisa Barbieri in The Guardian today:

So, surely it would be far more useful for everyone if women were taught to read signs of their own fertility. This would attune them with their bodies and help them notice changes, and they could then, in certain cases, get help well in advance of actually wanting to have children. Such insight into your own fertility can be found by charting your monthly period, temperature, cervical fluid and cervix position. Easy, quick and empowering when you know how. It’s not fashionable to do this, but it can help determine if you have a short luteal phase (which may deter successful implantation of a fertilised egg), and can even help you see the menopause coming.

I’ve studied biological science and feminism and yet I’ve never heard of half of that. (Of course the fact that I never have and never will want to get pregnant might have something to do with that, but I doubt this info, which sounds rather important if you might be interested one day, is widely available.)

For those concerned about this issue it might be well worth looking into – you’re not a statistic but an individual body.

And I seem to be in the middle of something of a flood of babies at the moment. I’m 40, and I know a lot of now-pregnant women, most of them broadly around my age. I’m thinking about not drinking the water for a while…