I pinned the clipped-out piece of newsprint to the corkboard above my desk and next to it I put the photograph we had bought from the hospital, the ultrasound image of what would be my daughter. Looking at both of them, side by side or separately, I felt the same: a kind of plunging incomprehension, an absolute inability to make sense. These two things – a view of the ground in the outer solar system and a picture of the inside of my own body, of the entity that had taken root there to build itself cell by cell towards an articulated experience of grass in sunshine or the smell of violets – existed beyond the boundaries of my constructed world …