The greatest moment of my life

THERE are moments that happen to us in life which are so breathtaking that you know – even as they are happening – they will stay with you forever.

7.01pm, on Friday, April 9, was exactly one of those moments – my beautiful daughter, and first child, entered the world.

The headlines first – this is a newspaper, after all. She is healthy, and her mum is too, and both are back home from hospital and doing well.

It goes without saying the NHS was incredible, but it always bears repeating, because it’s easy to forget how lucky we are to have it.

If you paid attention in sex education classes you’ll know I – the father – did not play the leading role in this drama.

The real star of the show – my fiancée – was completely wonderful throughout, to the complete surprise of absolutely nobody.

Now I use words for a living, and naturally if you’re reading this you’ll be expecting me to use some. That’s generally how these things work.

But the truth is I have none to describe how it felt when she was born.

The words in my vocabulary don’t even scratch the surface.

Curiously, it wasn’t even like they were heightened versions of things I’d previously felt.

I mean, obviously, I’ve felt excited before. I’ve felt proud, elated, and most other emotions.

But these weren’t old emotions rehashed. These were brand new.

It was as though someone had invented a whole new palette of emotions, and was liberally decorating the inside of my mind with a smorgasbord of new, technicolour emotions previously unavailable to me.

Perhaps – I thought shortly afterwards – this was some evolutionary quirk from our caveman days, a hormonal flash in the pan to make sure I protected my daughter from sabre-toothed tigers or whatever.

But even now, as I write this at 3am, rocking my daughter to keep her asleep, they’re still coursing through me, and the jolt I still get every time I look at her is visceral.

I have a hunch it will never go away.

I’m well aware I’m not the first to feel this, nor the last.

And it’s not as though I wasn’t told what an amazing feeling it would be.

But no-one ever said it would be this good.

I suppose because they couldn’t – as I said, the words don’t exist.

It feels as though I have won all the jackpots at once – I have completed the game of life and the credits will start rolling any minute. But the glorious reality is that this is just the start.