JANUARY

       ‘Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.’

      SAM LEVENSON

      Tuesday 1 January

      I am a father.

      I have a son.

      My son is alive.

      My wife is alive.

      My son and my wife are both alive.

      I am alive.

      We are all alive. Happy new year.

      I am a father. Right now. As of forty-three minutes ago. For forty-three minutes, I have been a father.

      It must have been the cold air hitting me when I stepped out of the maternity ward. Not just the cold air, of course. I am perfectly capable, under normal circumstances, of not fainting in the face of cold air. There were other contributing factors, too. Lack of food, for instance. I hadn’t eaten for forty-six hours. You lose your appetite when your wife is groaning at you and the midwives are barking at you and no one’s dilating quickly enough and everything’s going wrong. For forty-six hours.

      The only sustenance I’d had during the whole debacle was a gulped whisky during the small hours of the first night of the two-night labour when it was only me and Isabel (and the bump). The whisky was purely medicinal. We’d been ‘in labour’ for a good eighteen hours by then and I needed something to stiffen my resolve and prevent me from running, screaming, from the house. What a huge mistake that was. Running, screaming, from the house would have been a far more sensible course of action than staying for the full Reservoir Dogs experience. Isabel and the bump would have managed fine without me.

      Lack of sleep: that’s another of the extenuating circumstances leading to my fainting in a bush next to the ambulance bay. I have never stayed up for forty-six hours in my life. Hardened SAS men give up sensitive military secrets if they are kept awake for that long. But I’m not a hardened SAS man, and I wasn’t allowed to sleep. Or I might have been allowed, but I never dared ask: one doesn’t want to appear unsupportive during these (many) hours of need.

      As it turns out, the first eighteen of the forty-six hours, the ones in the run-up to the whisky, weren’t actual labour. They were only pre-labour, a sort of softening-up phase God threw in so that everyone would be completely exhausted gibbering wrecks by the time the proper labour began.

      I didn’t enjoy the pre-labour. I’m pretty sure Isabel didn’t, either. She was having are-you-sure-this-isn’t-the-actual-labour contractions every fifteen minutes or so. And when I say contractions, I mean proper on-all-fours, groaning and screeching and spitting like the possessed girl in The Exorcist. With me, frantic, helpless, stroking her lower back like they encouraged in the prenatal classes. And her saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ and me saying, ‘It’s okay, darling. Swearing is a good release. They said that in the NCT class.’ And her saying, ‘Okay, well stop fucking tickling my back or I’ll fucking kill you,’ and me saying, ‘Yes, darling’. And then her head spinning around 360 degrees.

      That was the pre-labour. Eighteen hours, punctuated only by a midwife coming round and saying, ‘Well done, dear,’ before leaving again. And me, about halfway through, saying, ‘Are you sure you want to stick with the whole home-birth plan, because we could go to hospital like everyone else? They have nice monitors and tubes and drugs there and stuff.’

      And then the whisky. Thank God for the whisky. For a minute, a beautifully precious minute, peace and quiet. Nerves settling. The clock saying 1.30 a.m. and me wondering whether I could sneak in forty winks since we all seemed to be relaxing into this whole giving-birth thing.

      No. Oh no. The moment of tranquillity evaporated as soon as Isabel gave out a real, proper, blood-curdling scream. It was a new noise altogether, a noise that, if you heard it in the distance while you were sitting in a safari truck halfway through a night drive in the Okavango Delta, would prompt you to immediately ask the ranger to drive you back to the camp. It was a noise that would chill a man to the very core, make him drop to his knees and pray, even though he doesn’t believe in God, to make this all stop happening.

      MY PRAYER

      Dear Lord,

      If you can get us through this thing, this terrifying thing, I promise never, ever to have unprotected sex with my wife or anyone else ever again. I promise to give my life to you and spend my days wandering the world preaching your gospel. Without shoes on and everything. Make the next few hours pass as quickly and painlessly as possible, oh, Mighty One, and I shall never, ever be a twat again, I really, really promise. And I’ll bring up the bump in the Christian faith, rather than encouraging him down a more logical humanist path. I promise.

      Amen

      …and that was it: the start – only the start – of the ‘real labour’. All systems go. ‘This is Houston, you are cleared for liftoff,’