Yesterday I wrote the hardest entry yet. I have been shying away from writing it, dreading revisiting that day in such detail. The pain of it will never leave, I suppose. I don’t think any parent could live through such a day and forget. Both my sons were irrevocably changed that day. So was I.

I’ve lost track of how many times we have picked Alex and bits of motorbike up over the years. I’ve seen him laid on backboards, strapped immobile. But there has always been that knowledge that, even with broken bits, he is ok and will give me that rueful grin, more concerned with the damage to his bike…

I have lost count of how many times Nick has come home with chunks missing, to be patched up and go out and do it again…

But those four words, “We have your son..”.. I’ll never forget hearing them and the way the bottom fell out of my heart.

The wait for Nick to come out of surgery was long, desperately long. I started at every sound, waiting for the inevitable ‘I’m sorry..’ that I was expecting. We had been given absolutely no room for hope.

The police were, I have to say, remarkable. The officers we dealt with were as gentle as they could be. I had to tell them all about Nick and his life, as much as I knew living so far away. In turn, they told me much of what had happened, as far as they knew at that point.

I will gloss over the next few hours. Indeed, I remember it all as a blur at that point, though I remember the little details too…punctuated by tears and a fear I cannot describe. It was, I think, the horror that this had been done by another human being that made it all the harder to accept. It didn’t seem possible that this wasn’t a nightmare and everything had a strange sense of unreality about it.

The puncture wound looked tiny…no more than a shaving cut. It had been overlooked to begin with, being so small and unobtrusive. Why should anyone have assumed it was a stab wound, deep into the brain? It was only when the scans came back, I think, that the full extent was known, when the shards of bone from the depressed fracture showed up in Nick’s brain. They had thought perhaps he had hit his head but that didn’t explain the bleeding or swelling in the brain.

When the doctors came back with what they had been obliged to do and that Nick had survived the surgery we couldn’t believe it. Nor, I think, could they. I wondered whether they were giving us a ‘worst case’ scenario so that they covered all eventualities. I asked them. No, they thought he would go shortly.

I was allowed to see him briefly, my beautiful son, once more attached to so many tubes, with more sewn into his shoulder and chest, cannulas in both arms, the ventilator breathing for him. It seems silly, but even today, those tiny, almost invisible marks where they had sewn the tubes into his shoulder still throw me. They had shaved half his hair and cut his face around the hairline, from the centre of his forehead to his ear, peeling it back to access the wound. A blood-stained track of huge metal staples sat around his face like some mocking echo of a crown of thorns. There was a huge, bulbous probe, iodine covered, sticking out of the top if his skull on the left, like something out of a horror movie. His face even more swollen than before.

The policeman brought me a chair, I remember, and a box of tissues. He had children of his own. I wish I remembered his name. I sat, stroking my son’s arm, in a way he would have probably found extremely annoying had he known. I couldn’t hold his hand, because of the tubes. I remember calling him a daft bugger. I remember telling him it was okay to go if he had to, and that he was loved.

It was going to be a long journey for all of us. We had no idea.

That my son survived is down to the miracles of modern medicine, some exceptional doctors and the quality of the nursing care at the Wessex, to the prayers of so many people worldwide and to his own stubbornness. Tell Nick something is impossible and he would always do his best to prove you wrong.

Which is why I will be going to see my son later, in his own home, just back from a ridiculous and unexpected holiday he should not have been able to manage and with a lovely young lady beside him too.