Foreign travel when pregnant can be a mixed bag. Sometimes it's great; sometimes it's a nightmare.

On one occasion I arrived at Lisbon airport, running, running. A security guard stopped me, babbling questions in Portuguese. After thirty years of flying, my brain was telling me one thing: Be Nice To Security. I smiled.  ‘Baby’ he said, pointing. ‘Come with me’.  He took my bags, and led me through a side door to a queue-less security point where I was sent around the scanner. My mind cast back to the anaconda-queue through Terminal Three the day before, when the BAA security guy blanked my anxiety about standing for so long. Although it’s not just BAA – looking back, that was the only time in perhaps twenty or thirty flights when my pregnancy was obvious that I was shown around a queue.  

On that same flight out of Lisbon, the BA air cabin steward confidently sat down next to me. ‘So they told you about the meals then?’ Apparently they were short of meals in business, and I had been ‘selected’ not to get one.  I had not been told. I clarified that they had specifically ‘selected’ the pregnant lady. All the other business travellers were male. 'Well obviously... had I known... oh dear.'  He faltered, his earlier assurance crushed. To my shame, I was overwhelmed by tears; too exhausted and too hungry to be polite (I'd been up since 5am).  

Eventually he says I can have the pilot’s lunch. But a hungry pilot strikes me as a worse idea than the sobbing pregnant lady in 2C. Meanwhile the other passengers were mortified; so much so, in fact, that a kind man donated his lunch to me.

By contrast on another BA flight, this time to the US, the BA head of cabin services came over to introduce herself. She asked when I was due, adding with a conspiratorial smile, ‘I’ve done all the training... just hoping not to have to try it out tonight’. She was very warm and made sure I had kind and attentive service.

During my final work trip, my colleagues and I got off the Eurostar in Paris to find (as usual) an enormous taxi queue at Gard du Nord.  We hesitated for a moment, wondering how late we were going to be for our meeting, when I was pointed at and summoned to the front by a man in uniform.  He pushed me into the first taxi in the queue and my colleagues scuttled in behind me, suddenly thrilled by the perks of travelling with the fat lady.

There are two things I do notice. Nobody on planes ever helps with my bags. I don’t object: if you’ve signed up to travel, you must be able to manage your luggage.  More importantly, it’s not because my fellow passengers are impolite: if you load on and off planes frequently you do so in invisible bubbles that protect you from the anxious hordes bustling around. You have to, if you want to stay sane.

I also notice that, despite the requirement of a medical letter giving you permission to fly after 28 weeks, no one ever, ever asks for it.