Today I met a very important person. Not Sting, or Obama, or the queen. Today I met Aria.

She’s tiny and pink and wriggly, and she can’t see me very well but she knows I’m holding her like the most expensive bag of flour in the world, careful as a child tiptoeing upstairs with warm milk.

The clearest memory I have in the whole making of her is crying in the toilets with the girl that she’ll call Mama. And now she’s here, she’s made. I told her Mama she’d have handwriting one day and she will, she’ll fill book after book with spellings and maths and stories.

A whole new world has begun with the birth of her mind and there’s no telling what secrets she has to tell us. Whether she’ll be a poet or a nurse or a bus driver or an astronaut. Whether she’ll love tutus and sparkles or cowboys and pigs. I hope it’s all of them, anything.

Everything.