The problem with unthinkable things is that, at 2am, they’re very thinkable

Now I was wide awake, narrowing my eyes in that way you do to hear better in the dead of night. Jumping to the carpet I moved into the room in which my son and daughter were sleeping – faces wet, sheets long since discarded – and encountered the unmistakable smell of burning. I examined everything I could in the still, silent dark. Nothing seemed meaningfully on fire. There’s only one plug socket in the room, to which is attached a lamp and a small, metal fan. I racked my brains to think of anything else in the room that might be giving off the strange whiff of metallic embers, before disconnecting the lamp and taking the fan downstairs.

That, I was reasonably sure, was that. My role as a doughty protector of my family fulfilled, I traipsed back up to bed. But sleep refused me. I was, for the first time in a while, reacquainted with that baseline adrenaline which sits beneath all parenting, under each sun-drenched snapshot and idle, dreamy hug – the senseless, screaming terror that I will sometimes be the thing standing in the way of bad things happening to my children, and that smarter, better, more diligent parents than I have had the unthinkable happen on their watch.

The problem with unthinkable things is that, sooner or later, they’re very thinkable indeed. My mind buzzed with lurid imaginings of some unseen, unsmelled hazard bearing down on my children, immolations and explosions, flames licking their cherubic little faces, gases filling their lungs as some burning apocalypse bore down on them, while I snored contently in my bed.

And I was up once more, re-entering their room, smelling the same cordite tang as before – was it fainter now? – and methodically working through every surface I could. I took to my hands and knees, scouring every inch of carpet for something that could be the culprit. Upturning Lego and picture books and Pokémon cards in search of, what – a faulty air fryer they’d dragged up to their room as a lark? A purloined camping hob? Common sense discarded entirely, I jabbed around their damp bodies to see if they’d thought to enliven their bedtime routine with some matches and an oily rag.

I’m not a fearful person by nature. I sometimes tease my wife and her mum, because they exist in a constant state of panicked readiness, informed by a near-endless retinue of horrible real-life case studies they’ve gathered from back home over the years. I can only presume they have a lifetime subscription to Ways Children Have Been Maimed or Killed: Ireland because I don’t know how else one accumulates such tales, but the result is there are few objects, pastimes, locations or events, which don’t, for them, come freighted with cautionary fables.

I’ve lost count of the times the topic turned to, say, sliding glass doors, outdoor swimming pools, hula hoops or heated blankets, only for one of them to chime in with an ashen-faced refrain of “Well, did you hear about that poor child in Longford?”, followed by a breathless retelling of the most grisly anecdote you’ve ever heard. On such occasions, I tell them we can’t live in fear of every little thing, and they’re apt to tell me that that’s what those parents in Dundalk or Lurgan thought, shortly before their child was impaled by uncooked spaghetti, or set alight by a faulty tumble dryer.

Now, cross-legged in my kids’ bedroom, it was my turn to imagine every impalement or combustion that could possibly happen to them. The bedroom apparently free of risks, I ventured downstairs to the object I’d earlier removed. This, I decided, would be the clincher. I moved closer to inspect it, channelling every atom of fatherhood into a single, fine point; one that saw me, at 3am, in my underpants, leaning into the dark on my kitchen counter, in order to sniff a fan.

“Oooof,” I said, aloud, encountering the self-same metallic burn I’d first encountered hours earlier. Its fuse had obviously burnt out and I, my offspring’s valiant protector, had done the right thing by removing the offending object an hour ago. By now, highly attuned to risk assessment, I knew to bundle it into a bag and place it out of reach – on the off chance, presumably, that my children would get up in the middle of the night, grab a small stool, and plug it in for the propulsive thrill of turning on a fan. Best not to take risks, after all. Did you not hear about that poor child in Donegal?

Photograph by Getty Images