It was a heart attack.

After the away day at work, I met Pip for a drink before she started work and my Christmas party kicked off. In Sam’s Chop House, mum called and said that dad had been moved from Kettering to Glenfield hospital in Leicester because he’d had a heart attack. It turned out that he’d had a heart attack before when he’d had chest pains on Thursday, but it wasn’t as severe as Friday. Everybody was flustered, not least me, and so the facts aren’t clear: was it two or three attacks by Friday night? Anyhow, I ditched the work party and went for a quick pint at Trof, then headed home to sleep, via the best part of a bottle of Jack.

Saturday was bitterly cold. Taking out my headphones to talk to mum on the phone meant putting two ice-cubes back into my ears afterwards. The announcer at Leicester station said, “First Class is reported to be at the back of the train,” as if he didn’t trust the information he was getting. Neither did mum, it seemed. She's seen a lot of death, having worked in so many old people's homes. She'd emphasise the "...they say he's..." in a way that - weirdly - wasn't distressing, as if she knew all the tricks in the book, so things weren't so bad. The platform announcer wouldn’t refer to St Pancras by its new name either, preferring ‘London St Pancras,’ to the shiny new ‘St Pancras International.’ Out with the new and in with the old, I thought. The sun danced on my notebook as we passed through Market Harborough. My dad, at 54, is exactly twice my age.

I saw him around six. He told me that he’d had an operation to re-inflate a collapsed artery involving a balloon. They entered the artery through his groin, and fed the balloon up with a tiny camera. He pulled his pants to one side and showed me the cut. He had black and purple inner elbows where he’d been on a drip, and holes in the tops of his hands where some monitoring device or other had been attached, but otherwise he just looked like dad in pyjamas. He was shaken, but looked well otherwise. I’d worried about seeing him looking ill, but he didn’t. The man in the bed next to him had grey skin. I was glad dad looked so normal. He said he’d be out on Tuesday.

Today I found out that he had another heart attack last night, and that he’d be in hospital for another couple of days. He’s diabetic too, my sister told me. One lager a day hereafter will be quite a downshift for him. He seems willing to make a lifestyle change, she said. He’ll have to, she said.

Everybody around me has been wonderful. Pippa, Louise, Clare, Paul, Woody, Sam, Robbie, Lewis, Julie, Tracy, Vince – my phone’s text inbox has never been crammed with good wishes. I'm still shaken though, and can barely grasp what's happening.