An article about plain relief and relaxtation during childbirth and Labour. Katharine Graves argues that traditional methods of pain relief have significant side effects for the newborn baby, and that expectant mothers could do much worse than consider a effective modern alternative - HypnoBirthing.

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Sailing in Liguria

This rather late Blog post is mostly just an excuse to show some quite amazing pictures. We were very kindly lent a 6m yacht belonging to my cousin Henry, who has made his home in Milan these last 20 years or so.

Sam's grannys kindly looked after him for three days each so that Anna and I could get away, and we left straight after Malk and Caitlin's fabulous wedding in Norfolk. On the Monday night we stayed with Henry in his new Milan apartment, walls lined with his paintings, listened to the CD of his rag time piano music, and ate some delicious Italian home cooking. What hospitality - what talent!
Early on Tuesday we were off to Genoa Sestri by train with Henry, and got down to the boat, prepared, launched, and dropped Henry off late afternoon at the other end of Genoa to find his way home. For much of the week there was a big swell coming up from some heavy weather near Corsica, which combined with the light winds made sailing sometimes uncomfortable.
But needless to say we still had a great week, drinking coffee, eating Pizza and other delicious italian specialities, and being pretty lazy, drifting from one little port to the next along the coast. The weather gave us a couple of reading days, and I was able to finish off an internet job from a cafe in one of the villages, not bad!
But one particular highpoint came when we had just got into the small port of Ciavari, just a few miles east of Porto Fino. Looking back over our just-covered track we saw this amazine water sport / whirlwind / tornado or whatever you'd like to call it.
The thing twisted and turned and was heading straight for the coast, where we had only just been. We expected devastation, but on arrival at the cliff base the thing lost the driving force that gave it life - the warm water of the mediterranean, and it just diappeared up itself back into the clouds!
On the way back up the coast we took shelter from a rather fierce looking Thunder cloud in Genoa's main harbour, quite an intimidating place in a 6m boat. We eventually found a place they would let us moor up, and wandered the dark streets of the port city having a nocturnal look around an interesting old city.
The large ship below was one of our closer neighbours in the morning, around with hundreds of others of a similar scale. Safe to say that in Auckland, the Solent or anywhere else we have never been exposed to this amount of large shipping - we even had to negotiate a traffic jam of liners on our way out in the morning.

The run back up the coast was another unique experience. Along the whole of the seafront of Genoa there is a sea will of about 4miles long, which contains the harbour, the airport, and the whole of the city. Once you go out of one end there's nowhere to come in until you get to the other, running along parallel to the airport runway for the last mile or so. The swell had built up to about 2m during the week, which is quite a bit for a little boat with an outboard motor, but with so little wind we had to keep the sails up to steady the boat a little. Our one attempt at flying the spinnaker ended in a rapid failure with the waves bashing the limp rag of sail alternately between the mast, and a brief filling with air on the other side of the wave. Anyway along the front of Genoa the sea wall acted as a mirror, sending teh swell straight back out in parallel lines against their incoming brothers. With a 2m swell approaching you simultaneously form each side was interesting, and when the two briefly united, the boat was sent skywards with such force that once or twice our stomachs were in our mouths! (Metaphorically speaking, fortunately). For such an inoccuous situation it was actually one of the most uncomfortable rides I have had for a while, and that even includes the Fastnet in an odd kind of way.

Anyway we were soon back in the marina, off to Milan, then London the next day. Paul Richardson my old race mechanic and mate very kindly collecting us from Stanstead, and we were back at our desks in Cornwall and at work before we knew it.