My cup runneth over, yer a jeenyus an’ a jenneleman! 
The two Mrs. J.S. Bach had 20!
My maternal grandmother had 17 children of whom 10 survived into adulthood. Not surprisingly perhaps she died young - in her fifties.
My god daughter’s mother said, after having her 2nd in her late 30’s, “If I’d known having babies was this wonderful I would have had one a year for the past 10 years”
Now, I have never witnessed a birth. I have only seen dramatised versions on telly and films. There’s an awful lot of pain-induced yelling which can go on for hours - as I heard a woman describe it on the radio "You come out with a lot of filthy language you didn’t know you knew… ".
The instinct to reproduce must be overwhelming, to do this more than once.
We’ve come a long way from extracting nails from floorboards but I have remembered something that links the two topics.
A discussion was taking place amongst the Test Match commentators [it was probably raining] about the generous size of the gluteous maximus muscles of fast bowlers. The great Fred Truman was one of those chatting.
“Fred,” said someone, “you’re well endowed in that department, aren’t you?”
"Aye, " said Fred, “if you’ve got a big nail, you need a big hammer to drive it.”
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Exaggerated dramatic nonsense, most of it. Obviously in some cases it can be traumatic etc etc but generally speaking it is a bit strenuous but no big deal, and unless you have some urgent medical reason not to you are better off staying at home and getting on with it. (I am sure going to hospital for what is after all a normal physiological process just makes it much worse, and this was confirmed by my work with MSF).
That ties in with what I recall my mother saying, in response to some dramatic TV rendering of a birth. “The village women [India, Java, Ceylon, Sumatra, Malaya et al, where she served in WW2] just used to squat down behind a bush and produce it”.
She was a sister in the QA’s, trained ‘old school’ including midwifery.
All the old craft skills are gone. If it can’t be fixed with WD40, Superglue or Duct Tape, chuck it out and buy new!
The best thing I’ve found for removing sticky labels is cigarette-lighter “petrol”. It’s worth keeping a tin to hand even if you don’t don’t use a Zippo to fire up your Gauloises. It evaporates quickly and doesn’t leave any oily deposits.
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Hi Martin,
How did this end?
What, of all the tips offered worked the best?
I’m asking because we have a number of oak beams studded with nails that I want to remove.
So far we’ve managed to pull more heads nails off than remove nails successfully.
