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‘Is the cord severed?’ I asked.

No, he said. And that was all I wanted to know. If it wasn’t severed then there was hope.

What I didn’t know was that Dave had already been taken aside and gently told to prepare for me being in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. He was to go home, this proud, tough, man’s man, and spend the next two nights howling in despair and grief. Who can comfort anyone after news like that? And how can I ever escape the guilt of loading so much pain on him and on Douglas, my son – the two people who love me most in all the world? Even now, that is a kernel of grief which nestles at the centre of my being. I did this to me. But I did it to them too.

While wider family life was in meltdown, the news rippling out, by contrast I was removed to a place of eerie, enforced calm. My first night of my new life was spent in the high dependency unit, doped to the eyeballs on opiates. ‘Serious but stable,’ said the bulletin released to my colleagues in the media. I would need a delicate operation to stabilise my neck, but my timing had been exquisitely inappropriate: just as I ploughed into the soil, Jesus was believed to be rising from the dead, everyone was on holiday, and no neurological spinal surgery would take place until Tuesday. In the meantime, with a spine unstable in two places, I must be kept totally immobile, nil by mouth, fighting nausea.