The thing I hoped to have buried forever

It’s funny how having a baby can raise your shame levels to new heights.

After flashing my bits to a complete stranger during childbirth and exposing my naked breasts while breastfeeding in the fruit and veg section of the local supermarket, it takes a lot to make me cringe nowadays.

But there is still something that never fails to turn my cheeks deep crimson. And now,  because I’m a woman of my word, I will share the whole thing with you.

A week ago, I found out I’d been shortlisted for a MAD Blog Award – I’m a finalist in the Best Baby Blog category. Once I’d stopped running around the room in excitement, it slowly dawned on me that I’d have to share a little story with you. I made a promise, you see. I said that if I was nominated for a MAD Blog Award, I would tell you about the time I got into a spot of bother with a few firemen. Nakedness was involved in the story, as was water.

Oh dear.

So let’s go back. Back to my pre-Frog days in 2008, when I worked on the Breakfast show of a radio station in Berkshire. My job involved getting up extremely early (4am kind of early) and reading the news. There were lots of other things involved too, but that’s irrelevent really.

Anyway, after a couple of months in my new job I was flagging one afternoon. I was at home, in my top floor flat and decided to have a bath. Ah, those pre-baby days where Neighbours followed by a long, leisurely bath were the norm. Lovely.

Except it didn’t go quite according to plan.

After turning on the taps and filling the bath with all manner of potions and bubbles, I decided to wait in my bedroom for the water to get nice and deep. With strains of Take That on the stereo and an engrossing book in my hand, I stripped off and wrapped myself in a towel before lounging on my bed.

And then I fell asleep. For three hours.

I was woken by a fireman standing at my bedroom door. By this time I had rolled off my towel and was stark naked. Bare as the day I was born, but with hairy legs and a bikini line to rival the Amazon Forest. Not really the way I like to greet visitors.

As I scrambled to find something to cover me, three more firemen popped their heads around the door.

Slowly, I made sense of the situation. After falling asleep my bath had overflowed, flooding my top floor flat and pouring down the walls of my neighbour’s flat below. Turns out ten minutes of his banging on the door wasn’t enough to rouse me, so he called 999. Not only did the firemen have to put a ladder up to my living room window and make an emergency entrance, the police and an ambulance were also called.

Embarrassed isn’t even the word.

And it gets worse. The next morning, still reeling from my stupidity, I came into work to find one of the firemen had left a message on the answerphone at work. So the “incident” was played out across the whole of Berkshire and North Hampshire on the radio. Which meant the papers got hold of the story, so decided to prolong my shame even further. Just in case anyone missed my humiliation, they printed the whole thing in black and white. You can read it here if you don’t believe me.

And now, three years on from the whole sorry episode, I’ve shot myself in the foot and brought it all to life yet again.

Brilliant.

I still need your votes in the MAD Blog Awards. Just follow this link and vote for Mother’s Always Right to win Best Baby Blog. *shameless plug over*