Toby Young: It's biological, I become a caveman when my child is sick

The first sign that something was wrong with Ludo was when he complained of a tummy ache. This was after school and hardly a rare occurrence so I didn’t think anything of it. The following morning, he still had a tummy ache. Not a good enough reason to miss school in my opinion, but Caroline thought otherwise. Before I left for a meeting I told him to eat some toast. ‘You’re probably just hungry,’ I said.

By lunchtime the pain had become localised on the lower left-hand side of his stomach and Caroline decided to Google his symptoms. It sounded like it could be appendicitis so she took him to the GP and he advised her to take him to paediatric A&E at Chelsea and Westminster. The paediatric registrar who examined him thought there was a ‘60 per cent chance’ it was appendicitis and booked him in for surgery. That was just as well, because by the time they wheeled him into the operating theatre his appendix had burst.