The longer I stayed in hospital, the more I came to understand why it is our blood relations who will respond, instinctively and without question, to the claims of family. Since my divorce I had lived in a world seemingly outside family, but there were moments during those first hospital days when it seemed that family was the only world that mattered. At the time I could hardly express the thought, but I found it intensely moving to see my father in his London suit nobly and indefatigably appearing each day at my bedside, while my mother moved about among the nurses in the background. And at the centre of this new world was the tirelessly supportive, uncrushable, smiling figure of my wife of two months, my beloved Sarah. If I were now to reduce my experience in hospital to two key words they would be family and love.
