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.