Laughing out loud
24th January 2012
LOL? ROFL? Well maybe not, but I did scare fellow bus passengers with my stifled chortling this morning when reading Caitlin Moran’s column in response to research that breastfed babies are harder to soothe (The Times magazine 21.1.12).
I thought at the start that she would be triumphal on the benefits of artificial feeding but no. In her eyes the main advantage of breastfeeding is the opportunity in later life for amusing anecdotes!
Ah yes, we can all share those. Her description of the power of breastfeeding was the thing that did it for me. On a visit to the set of the Antiques Roadshow her 6-month-old daughter began to cry. Loudly. This resulted in Caitlin being urgently removed from the set with the explanation ‘that if the sound of a baby crying makes it on to the show, nursing mothers at home complain that it triggers their let-down reflex’. Moran comments, ‘the idea that I might, inadvertently, have just been responsible for the spontaneous lactation of 14 million viewers was disconcertingly alarming. I imagined millions of bosoms across Britain suddenly exploding with the same kind of velocity that blows off manhole covers during water main bursts.’
ROFL, not really but certainly LOL.
