THIS MAN’S LIFE
marked down for absolute destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you.”
That’s pretty much how I feel about cancer.
Then there’s the creeping sense of failure within you as the years tick grimly past, bringing with it all these realisations of defeat. Of disappointment. You are not a man of substance, giant wealth and immense moral courage.
When I enter the room, the temperature doesn’t change, nor does the traffic stop when I appear on the street. I am not in possession of that magic stuff. People don’t pay rapt attention to everything I say.
Of course, I’m exaggerating a bit here but a certain numb feeling does wash over me at these moments. Until my baby shuffles into the room, ranting incoherently, like Donald Trump, about her Peppa Pig books.
Until Emilia arrived, I felt a bit lost and without a proper function in life. Now that she is here, I am hugely happy, for the most part, but on occasion you feel a dreadful sense of your own mortality and the horrors of ageing; all because of her, this chirping, smiling, laughing, pooping bundle of absolute, undiluted joy.
I was feeding her the other night before bed and she gave me the biggest smile in the history of baby smiles. There I was — like knight Antonius playing chess with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal — trying to work it all out in my head. . .
When she’s 30, I’ll be clinging on to this mortal coil by my fingernails at the not-so-tender age of 78.
And it will be some stretch of the imagination, some leap into the dark, for her dear daddy to attend her 40th birthday party.
So, when the blessed baba finished her bottle, and I her changed her nappy before putting her in her cot, Emilia kicked me in the face. So that was probably a message from the universe for her daddy: cop the feck on, dad. She is too young for an explanation of existentialism. Not that I could give her a decent one, to be fair. I would prefer her to see life as a triumph of optimism over cynicism.
At the moment — 19 months old — she doesn’t possess a single cynical bone in her body. I worry that when she reaches an age that she will require some more-than-adequate advice on life and how to