IF YOU CAN’T STOP –
Nov. 1, 2025 – Have you ever heard a word that jolts you to attention? That word, for me, was “workaholism” – and when I heard it through my headphones earlier this year, listening to an audiobook on the tube, I felt a pang of something between recognition and panic. It transported me back to the worst time in my life. In May 2016, when I was nearly five months pregnant, I travelled to rural Norway to make a short documentary for the Guardian. The Norwegian government was making asylum seekers – from mostly Muslim countries – take cultural education classes about women’s rights. I’d been invited to a class in Moi, a town by a lake framed with pine trees, 100km south of Stavanger.
My pregnancy hadn’t been easy. I’d bled heavily at nine weeks, after coming off set on Sky News. It was the early hours of Good Friday, and I had to wait four agonising days to be scanned and ultimately told everything looked fine. Then the routine 12-week screening gave my baby a one in two chance of being born with Down’s syndrome. A 20cm needle was inserted into my belly to check his chromosomes; while I waited for the results, I buried myself in work, recording something for BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. It turned out my baby didn’t have Down’s, or any other chromosomal abnormality, but I was told I should go to Great Ormond Street hospital to have his heart checked. By 19 weeks, my pregnancy was officially declared normal. I bought some maternity T-shirts to cover my now unavoidable bump, and got on the plane to Norway.
