Looking Death in the Face Has a Way of Reorganising Your Priorities

There has been a bit of a radio silence on my Substack blog over the past week. I’ve been busy fighting fires. Not bush fires, but fires within myself. I am quite a private person, and do not easily share intimate details of my life outside a very small circle of friends. But I think there are some life lessons in what happened to me this week, and I want my readers to see a very human side of me. We journalists and scholars like to be in control, and we like to offer readers a confident and informed reading of events. But sometimes, our life can spiral out of control, and our humanity is exposed to us in all of its precariousness.

It all began on the 5th of July, with the birth of my beautiful daughter, Clara. I sat in the hospital room waiting to be assured that my wife was fine, and waiting for our baby to be delivered via a Caesarean section, and brought up to me so that I could hold her in my arms. Obviously, I was anxious as I waited a full hour for the result of the operation.