Our baby girl was born on February 10th.

We took my wife to the hospital in Sharjah the night before; then I brought Ian (21 months) home and we managed some sleep without her. I dropped him off at the baby sitter early in the morning. As I drove out along Emirates Road, on the way to the birth of my daughter, I glanced to the right: there, a couple of hundred metres away, was a graveyard, its silver markers gleaming in the lemony light of the rising sun. I meditated on birth and death: life’s beginning and end. Where do we come from and where do we go? Is it nowhere and straight back there, or is there more to it than that?

Two hours later I was watching them lift my baby daughter flailing from the womb, cleaning her down, cropping her cord, sprucing her up and readying her for the long journey ahead.

A few days on, driving Emirates Road in the afternoon. I glanced across and realized that the graveyard had really only been a vegetable farm.