The tour is over and we’re now officially on maternity leave from performing. Our final gig was at a private party and when the hosts booked us, they had no idea they’d have two 8-month-pregnant women waddling through their marquee, worrying about the strength of the temporary stage blocks. Thankfully it was a rural area and there were several farmers in the audience, so we felt reassured that between them there would be some lambing experience we could call upon if necessary.
We left the gig on a high. Neither of us had given birth! We’d both been given a plated meal backstage! We could hang up our head mics and sit on our arses for the rest of our pregnancies! When we got into the waiting taxi to get the last train back to London, the driver wasn’t quite in the same headspace. He was angry that we were a bit late (“I’ve got a bloody pick-up waiting in Saffron Walden”), he was concerned about his gammy clutch (“I knew I should have brought the other shitting car”) and he hadn’t been expecting luggage (“the boot’s full of crap for my wife’s bollocking watercolour class”). He didn’t realise quite how special this night was for us. Nor indeed how special we were. Obviously, we didn’t want to be treated any differently just because we were heavily pregnant, but the thing is...we were expecting to be treated very differently because we were heavily pregnant.
“Oh well - this will be a fun new character for our next show!”, we thought, as he glared at us in the rearview mirror. “A furious taxi driver - what potential!” And then the taxi broke down and we found ourselves stranded on the side of a country road in the pitch dark watching the last train to London disappear from the National Rail app and things got a bit less fun. Turns out he’d been right to worry about the clutch. And we discovered he was also right about our luggage being “a real ballache” when we had to haul it into another taxi and then onto two different trains from far-flung stations.
We made it back to Liverpool Street Station in the end so we didn’t miss out on our final Pregnancy Night Tube Experience - one of the features of this tour. A bump suddenly feels so prominent and out of context at 1:30am, as you’re sitting there wondering whether to give up your seat to someone who is legitimately ‘less able to stand’. And drunk people are much freer with their theories and opinions - on Friday a guy told Hannah that she was “100% having a boy” because her face looked “a bit masculine” (she knows she’s 100% having a girl) and a few weeks ago, a woman advised Fi that she should “seriously consider” eating her placenta, but only if it was raw.
So all in all, we’re starting to think that gigging non-pregnant again is going to feel a bit bland. Although, next tour, we will have two babies in tow...