This time last year I wrote in these pages about my fear of imminent fatherhood. My girlfriend was close to full term, and the realisation that life as I knew it was about to give way to one that I maintained never much appealed was beginning to dawn. We had been together, my girlfriend and I, for more than a decade by this point, and while a child was the inevitable next step, I was reluctant. I’d come to love the life we’d stealthily built up together: the friends, the restaurants, the holidays comprising backpacks, malaria tablets and a Rough Guide. The very notion of babies seemed, to me, too complicated and convoluted to ever take seriously on board.
But, largely at my girlfriend’s insistence, here we were anyway, on the precipice of parenthood. Eight o’clock on a freezing Christmas Eve night, and amid the kind of blood and butchery I thought had gone out with Victorian times, a couple of squabbling doctors finally delivered my daughter into the world. My girlfriend was exhausted but happy; the Spanish mother-in-law to be, who had just that minute burst through the doors of the delivery room, was incandescent with fresh grandmotherly joy.