The first time Gary Jenkins became a father, in 1995, his priorities changed in an instant. “I was a sales director, on the crest of a wave,” he says. “Becoming a father seemed to complement the full set: the car, the house, the job, the good life.” Holding his new daughter, however, he realised that he had never truly loved anything until that moment. “Suddenly, here I was, plunged into something beyond words, beyond my comprehension.”
When, 21 years later, his second child, a son, was born, everything about that first experience came back to him: the sleepless nights, the nappy technique, the feeling that he had a new vantage point on “the circle of life”. But this time around, fatherhood felt more “visceral”, as he puts it. “The poignancy is much…