Jody Marley Mullan arrived on Wednesday afternoon. 8lbs 4oz. Mum’s doing brilliantly. We brought him home to Winnie yesterday.
That’s it on that front. You don’t need the rest.
What I keep coming back to, though, is the theatre.
We were booked in for a planned caesarean at Homerton Hospital: nine people in the room, gowned up and ready. At the last minute, a Category A emergency elsewhere in the labour unit cancelled everything. A Cat A is the highest classification (I Googled it at the time, in annoyance): someone in that hospital needed that team more urgently than we did. The annoyance lasted about thirty seconds. It dissolved pretty quickly once we thought about who needed them.
An hour or so later the same nine people came back. One mentioned, almost in passing, that she was hoping this would be the last case so she could get home by 3pm. Then they started.
What followed was unremarkable to everyone in that room, which is exactly what made it remarkable to me. Senior staff gave junior staff feedback throughout: direct, clear and kind, with no one performing for anyone else. The same checklist they presumably run through every single time, run through exactly the same way. The person whose job it was to keep us informed of what was happening did exactly that, at exactly the right moments. And then the two surgeons, at the close, working with a concentration I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a person. Neither looked up for twenty minutes.
There was blood on the floor at one point. Totally fine, apparently. They carried on.
At Emery Little we talk a lot about culture and high performance. We write it into our values, run whole days dedicated to it, read the books. What I watched in that theatre was something businesses spend years trying to build: nine people, same room, same checklists, the same standard every day, with no audience necessary.
The NHS takes a great deal of criticism, some of it fair. The waits are real, and so are the frustrations. But what I saw on Wednesday afternoon at the Homerton was genuinely elite: quiet, routine, and almost entirely invisible to the people delivering it every day.
By Thursday evening we were home, Winnie had met her brother, and everything was fine.
I won’t try to wrap this up neatly. Some weeks speak for themselves.
I’ll be back in two weeks with the financial planning content, I promise.
