Matthew Engel and his family adopted a baby girl from a Siberian orphanage and gave her new hope in Britain. He believes that it has brought happiness to everyone involved. So why does our affluent and stable country make potential parents feel like criminals? Why are there barely 200 overseas adoptions in Britain each year, yet almost 16,000 in the US?

Saturday May 29, 1999

I met my first child in roughly the way most fathers do. It was late spring in 1992; warm and humid, as I recall. We were in a small room off the maternity ward of a slightly underfunded hospital in an English provincial city. It was a difficult birth, and my son's cry was more than normally plaintive. We called him Laurie, after his maternal grandfather, who did not live to see him.

I met my second child on January 25 this year. We were in the nursery room at the Tyumen Municipal Orphanage, Siberia, which is very underfunded indeed. Outside, it was close to -30C. Our daughter was already eight months old and crawling. She immediately beamed at us. We called her Victoria, because someone already had. We are a bit hazy about her original maternal grandfather.

Fathering my son took a couple of glasses of wine, and a raise of the eyebrow. Fathering my daughter took 20 months, mostly spent battling against a bureaucracy that was often intrusive, inefficient, uncommunicative and unfeeling in a way the Tsars would have recognised. But that wasn't in Russia; the Russians were fine. It was in Britain.

It's not over yet, because, although we have irrevocably adopted Victoria under Russian law, the British process has nowhere near finished with us. There could yet be some official vengeance for what follows. This country has turned the adoption of a child into something very close to a crime: the perpetrators are harried, if not actually punished.

In Britain, you have a slightly better chance of adopting a baby less than a year old than you do of winning £1 million on the lottery. But only slightly better (175 lottery millionaires a year; maybe 300 babies adopted). For various reasons, few are available here. But, across the world, orphanages are full of babies and older children all literally crying out for a loving family. Almost 16,000 go to the US every year; around 4,000 to France. Here, only about 200 children were adopted from overseas in 1998. I can find nothing in our law or our culture to explain this, but everything in the implementation of the law by local authorities, civil servants and social workers.

I believe we have taken Victoria from a situation in which she had no hope and given her a chance of a happy and fulfilled life. From Russia to love. Happiness may elude her, of course - that can happen to anyone - but we will always do our utmost for her. Thus, something miraculous has already happened, for her and for us. Yet British officialdom sees things differently. Adopting a child involves indignities that should be unacceptable in a free society. But it has also given us the most extraordinary adventure of our lives: an emotional thriller, an epic.

We married late, that was the thing. We knew of each other for years, because we had many friends in common. When we did meet, it was on a professional basis: Hilary was a high-powered publisher, and I was a recalcitrant author. By the time we managed to change the subject from books, we were starting to straddle 40. We'd had good times separately: I'd knocked around the world for the Guardian; Hilary had risen to be editorial director of Pan. Our previous entanglements had managed to stop short of marriage and children.

We married quickly, and moved out of London to Herefordshire. Laurie came two years later. We wanted two, but there were three miscarriages, and time started to run out. Late at night, I would say that nobody had it all, that we were lucky to have Laurie, and should be satisfied. But Hilary never agreed. The turning point came on a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1997. We were with friends in Oxfordshire, Nick and Fanny Arbuthnott. Another couple was there, the journalist Charles Nevin and his wife Liv O'Hanlon, writer and director of the pressure group Adoption Forum. Each couple had two children, all plucked from hopelessness in Latin America, all visibly bright and vigorous and thriving. It was Laurie the singleton who seemed the odd one out. A few days later, we rang social services.

The first representative of Hereford and Worcester County Council wanted us to consider fostering, not adoption. It was clear that we were far too old to be allowed to adopt a British child, and we thought hard about what they said. But then we wrote and said we wanted to adopt from overseas. (Some local authorities have until recently forbidden this; it is surprising that such a crucial matter can depend on who empties your dustbins, but we soon stopped being surprised by anything.) A month later, in early September, we got a reply telling us that before we could start on the "home study" (cost in our area: £1,510) that is crucial to any adoption, we would have to go on a course. The next might be available the following spring. Not merely were we old; we were likely to get a great deal older before we could even get started.

We did have a social worker assigned to us, though. And this was our first stroke of luck. We have heard many horror stories about cold-fish social workers, especially in London, where home studies are habitually contracted out. But we had Sue Curren. She was friendly, caring and conscientious. And when Hilary found us a place on a course scheduled for Sutton Coldfield in November, Sue agreed to start the home study at once.

The huge county of Hereford and Worcester, a mad invention of the Heath government, no longer exists. But it did in 1997, and poor Sue has had to drive the 70 miles from her office in Droitwich to our home in the lee of the Black Mountains countless times now. It is essential for the state to assess prospective parents. Overseas governments require such an assessment before they will release a child. But what they require and what Britain gives them are somewhat different. The Martell family from Montana, who we were to meet in Siberia, had a home study, too: their social worker came round one morning for coffee and carrot cake. Sue put us through 28 hours of questioning. And that was before she grilled four sets of referees for two hours each.

What is the state's legitimate interest here? There is a potential immigration issue, but no one is worried about Britain being overrun by Russians with snow on their bootees. I accept that they ought to make sure we are not bankrupts, bandits, bullies or buggers, although none of that would prevent us having children in the normal way. They need to assess the risk of us rejecting the child after adoption, though with babies this is very rare indeed. Then they have to ask whether the whole thing is in the interests of the child, which is the cornerstone of British family law.

On all these points, Sue - backed up by police checks - might have made up her mind after two or three coffee (and maybe carrot cake) sessions, if not one. Hilary and I fumble through parenting no better than most, but it would have been clear to anyone that our home was already child-centred, that our existing child was well-adjusted within normal limits and short of only one thing, a sibling. British adoption practice has become so obsessed with finding perfect parents that the best has become the enemy of the good.

Of course, I was worried about risking Laurie's happiness. But he was five already, knew exactly what was going on and was involved at every stage. It was sort-of his idea: he would have preferred a brother, but you can't give children everything they want.

We wanted a girl. And, after much investigation, we settled on Russia. It was Liv O'Hanlon's suggestion. The Russians have large numbers of children in orphanages, which grow harsher as the children get older. Adoption is rare there, too, partly because people are hard-up and live in tiny flats, partly because of a cultural taboo; the few mothers who do adopt have been known to stuff pillows up their jumpers to fake pregnancy. The Russian government is not averse to children going overseas, and dozens go to the US every month. It is an intriguing twist of history, and there is a continuous rumble of discontent about it from Communists in the Duma.

My own grandfather had trekked west from what is now Poland, which provided a sort of cultural affinity, the sort of detail both the Russians and British social workers liked to hear. I never mentioned that he was escaping the beginnings of anti-Semitic persecution and the threat of conscription into the Tsar's army.

Maybe it was the east European in me, but I had my own taboo against adoption. Who knows where nature ends and nurture takes effect? Somewhere in the back of my own mind, there was a masculine prejudice against couples who adopt. (Don't they do it, then?) And life, quite frankly, was comfortable as it was. Laurie was old enough to be a pal as well as a son. Did I want to change a baby? Did I want a baby to change me?

There were other worries. We had heard of unscrupulous Latin American lawyers alleged to snatch babies, and of east European gypsies alleged to sell their kids. But we know the world is full of genuinely unwanted kids who desperately need homes. And the system soon ensured that positions became entrenched. Hilary was not going to be beaten by them. And nor was I. I enjoyed the first home study session. I began to understand why people go to psychotherapists. It offered the chance to talk about oneself without the cocktail-party obligation to break off and ask about the other person. And we did learn a lot about adoption theory, about the importance of bonding, and the possibility of "attachment disorder", when an institutionalised child becomes unable to form relationships. This heightened our resolve to get a child as young as possible. Hilary read a lot, and we absorbed and embraced the prevailing belief that adoption should never be a secret from the child.

But, as the sessions went on, and every single aspect of our life together was investigated, I began to get increasingly irritated. If Sue didn't actually ask how often we had sex and in which positions, she got pretty close. (Some social workers, I hear, are less delicate.) Any irritation with her was mitigated, however, by the course. It was run by the National Children's Homes, and it was good of them to take us. However, four November days in Sutton Coldfield, separated from our son, was never an attractive prospect. And it got worse.

One of the things I love about my profession is that I never (well, hardly ever) feel trapped. My job is to extract information quickly. If I'm bored then, ipso facto, Guardian readers will be bored; it's time to terminate the interview or leave the room. I haven't had to sit somewhere and be talked at since school. I had to sit in Sutton Coldfield. I doodled a lot. I got by until Day Three, which was devoted to race and sex. Then I flipped.

Prospective adopters in Britain are required to learn three things about race. 1) Racism is wicked. (I was even obliged to write an essay to this effect.) 2) On the other hand, it is "culturally inappropriate" to adopt a child of a different race. 3) No good will come of suggesting that these propositions might be contradictory. Indeed, expressing opinions of any kind is dangerous...

...As I discovered during the sex session. Of course, all parents need to be aware of the dangers of sexual abuse. Anxious to contribute in class, I remarked - uncontroversially, so I thought - that this was not a matter of absolutes: that there was a difference between someone buggering a toddler, and a 16-year-old having sex with a 15-year-old, even though both are criminal offences. I also mentioned, merely because it had been in the paper that day, a case of a 15-year-old girl who had seduced her 47-year-old headmaster. Again, I said, this was not to be compared with paedophilia. I was howled down by two social workers.

I shut up after that, but it was too late. The social workers shopped me. My file, I came to understand, complained about me doing "other work" (the doodling) and about my attitude towards sex abuse. I am willing to back my record on paedophilia against that of, say, the National Children's Homes (see newspaper files). Humility, however, was not the strong point of the people who had power over us. The prevailing orthodoxy among social workers might change next week. In the meantime, it was never to be questioned by the likes of us.

By New Year 1998, Sue was ready to complete her report. She was anxious, on our behalf, to present it to the local authority's adoption panel on February 2. However, this was not possible - the chairman was skiing that week. We would have to wait another month. I wrote and protested, very mildly. (I was, after all, paying heavily for this service.) I was brushed aside. Again, we were lucky. Many applicants are turned down. This panel - a mixture of social workers, councillors and others - decides on who may and may not adopt. When it finally met, it found in our favour, but not unanimously. I believe two or three out of ten said we were not fit and proper adoptive parents. There were various areas of concern: our age (a lot older than when we started); my attitude to sexual abuse; and the panel's view that "our expectations for the child were not as realistic as we said they were".

It is tempting to say I don't know what they meant. But I do. An adopted child, and a foreign one at that, was bound to be useless, whereas we, as middle-class parents, would be disappointed if she failed to win a scholarship to Balliol. We had explained, over and over, that we believed success in life was not to be measured by exam results. But we were obvious liars. Though we were approved, we still had to answer 16 (sixteen!) further supplementary questions, all of them, in our view, irrelevant.

I find it hard to believe now that three people in England could seriously believe that little Victoria would have been better off starving in a Siberian orphanage than at home with us. Lord knows how they manage to recruit all of them to sit on this ludicrous panel.

The next phase was meant to be straightforward. It involved a notary public, a massive pile of documents to be passed from us to the notary to the foreign office to the department of health and back again, a remarkable number of phone calls and faxes, regulations that seemed to change all the time, and an extra 144 quid demanded out of nowhere. Anyone less determined than Hilary would have given up. The purpose of all this was for the department of health to validate the council's decision. It was supposed to take ten working days. It took two months. We were told later that there had been Bank Holidays. Perhaps they have more of them in Whitehall than we do.

In early June, our papers were finally sent - notarised, legalised and approved - to the Cradle Of Hope adoption agency in Maryland. It is a further irony of history that the only way a British family can adopt a Russian child is through the US. But every other method seems untenable. Hilary talked to other American agencies. One got straight up her nose. Another told her that it was impossible for a British family: the Russians would not grant an adoption order until the child was granted entry clearance to Britain; and vice versa. This was wholly believable, though not, it turned out, actually true. Cradle Of Hope sounded reassuring and optimistic. Another family had recommended them, impressed that their offices were scruffy - always a good sign with a charity. -

Cradle Of Hope deals with orphanages throughout Russia. If a child is given up for adoption there, the name is kept on a database for three months. The mother can change her mind in that time, and has to sign away her rights on two separate occasions. Then the child is offered for adoption inside Russia, which hardly ever happens.

Only then can it be offered to foreigners. We asked for a girl who was as young as possible, and healthy. The agency said it might take them three months to offer us a child. It took six weeks, and it happened in the most dramatic circumstances imaginable. All year, my mother had been getting more and more frail. July 7, 1998, was her 80th birthday, and she was clearly unwell.

On the following Sunday, we held a party for her and, with a mighty effort of will, she was radiant. Her seven grandchildren were all there, but she was never to meet the eighth. The next day she went into hospital. Three days later, her condition deteriorated. I had spent that day researching a Guardian column about John Toland, the 18th-century Irish theologian, and his concept of Deism: the belief that, though God exists, He does not intervene - the world operates rationally. The Open Golf Championship was going on at the time, and American golfers kept insisting that God helps them sink their putts.

That evening, Helene, our social worker at Cradle Of Hope, rang up. She had a child for us: a healthy eight-month baby called Olga, who was in the orphanage at Achinsk. Early next day, Mum lapsed into unconsciousness. Before she did so, my brother was able to tell her the news. I don't believe anything could have made her happier. She died that afternoon. I never wrote the column on rationalism. The Guardian allowed me time off on compassionate grounds. And, anyway, here was something wholly irrational: one life ended and yet being replaced. Suddenly, I began to be sceptical about scepticism. Three days later, we were just leaving home to go to the funeral when the phone rang. It was Helene.

She was dreadfully apologetic, because she knew what a terrible time this was for us. Something had happened that hardly ever happened. Olga had been picked out for adoption by a Russian family, and they had preference. The workings of the universe seemed clearer to me once again. It was as I had always imagined: complete fluke leavened with the Law of Sod. But Helene was on the phone again a week later. She was, I thought, tentative. They had another baby to offer. Her name was Natalya, from Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East. She was already 15 months old, small, behind in her development, rather reticent. Somehow, we felt none of the surge of excitement that accompanied the first phone call.

If a child is available for adoption, the orphanage sends photos and/or a video, plus medical information, not always complete, but usually - in our experience - honest, designed to help you decide whether or not to proceed. Russian doctors seem inclined, if anything, to maximise a child's problems rather than minimise them. This is partly because a problem that might seem insuperable to them can often be treated in the West. It may also be that the orphanage can wheedle more money from the state for a sick child. The video of Natalya was quite long: it lasted ten minutes. A nurse tried to attract her attention with a succession of toys. She failed every time. The baby never smiled once.

We had thought all this through. We did not expect to adopt a child prodigy, though it might be nice to have one who could ram the county council's brand of genetic determinism back up their fundaments. The object of the exercise was to give a child the best chance of flourishing. There was no point in doing that if the baby was already damaged beyond repair. A paediatrician friend saw the video, and supported our instincts. Reluctantly, we rang Helene. She was extremely nice about it. We were entitled to reject a child; indeed, if we felt uncertain, it was the right thing to do. "We will find a home for this child, and a child for your home," she said, and sounded sweet and sincere, even if it was a well-worn mantra. But I sensed that the agency's guilt about Olga had been expiated.

Now we would have to wait. The autumn was wretched. There was no more news from Maryland. Hilary and I grew tetchy with each other. Laurie, just five when this started, was heading for six-and-a-half. He sometimes talked eagerly about his sister's arrival. But she can hardly have seemed very real to him. It was an even more wretched autumn in Russia. The stories of economic collapse and political instability made us fearful. Perhaps the crisis could wreck all our plans. It was late November before the phone rang again. There was a baby.

She was healthy. She was in Tyumen, a city in Western Siberia where adoptions worked particularly smoothly. Her name was Victoria. On the video, taken in September when she was four months old, she looked huge, with lots of dark hair, a hint of Russian bearishness mitigated by a luscious cupid's-bow mouth that kept breaking into a smile. Never mind Toland or Sod. We just knew, knew, that she was the one.

We arrived at Tyumen Airport one evening two months later. It was cold beyond all imagining. The hotel, however, was four-star, and could have been anywhere. I felt just a little cheated, having spent my last morning in England following guidebook advice, and trying to buy a bath-plug. Actually, a Siberian winter is very hot, as long as you don't attempt to go outside. Indoors, even in ordinary tower-block flats, the heating (assuming it is working) is always full-blast, and the only way to reduce it is to open the window, which, at †30C, is not recommended.

This applies to orphanages, too. Next day, we were driven there, and in a bright, pleasant but stiflingly hot nursery sat Victoria. At once, she beamed at us, as if to say, "Ah, I've been waiting for you." But, though she smiled on schedule, she had very little hair, and a pale, monkeyish face. I began to sense the problem when they gave me a bottle to feed her. It was sugar-water.

The video, in which she looked so healthy, had been taken in September. What had changed since September? Russia had gone broke. Who is likely to feel the pinch first in this situation? Answer: an orphanage. We were shocked and needed time to adjust. But events had their own momentum. The Martells of Montana were also in Tyumen and set on adopting their little boy, Gregory. They weren't faltering. The following day we were due in court, to adopt Victoria under Russian law.

Who knew when we would get another court date? The consequences would be horrendous. And how could we leave her? Clearly, the baby had been neglected. There were 150 children in the orphanage, but we hardly saw any except the dozen in the same nursery. It may have been significant that whenever I mentioned seeing the rest of the orphanage, the subject got changed. But I wasn't there as a journalist. If this was a Potemkin room, designed to fool the visitors about conditions, then my role was to get fooled. And the devotion of the staff seemed unquestionable. I believe they did the best they could.

I got one glimpse behind the lines. The babies were meant to sleep in a back room behind the nursery for ten hours at night with three two-hour naps a day, whether they wanted them or not. But they were tucked up for their midday nap 20 minutes early - perhaps for the staff's benefit, perhaps because we were disrupting routine, who knows? We had brought Victoria her first cuddly toy, a puppy, and wanted to leave it with her. I went into the dormitory.

There were 13 children in cots. One looked asleep. The rest, toyless, were in various stages of baby-wakefulness. Victoria was rocking herself furiously, backwards and forwards, in a desperate search for stimulation. At that moment, I was totally certain. We were going to get her out of there. Court No 4 in the Tyumen District Court was a small room, with a buzzing electric light.

There was nothing intimidating about it, except the fierce-looking Russian double-eagle crest. In a high-backed chair sat the judge, a mumsy, middle-aged woman wearing a leather jerkin and a lot of lipstick. The hearing was private; no one was allowed in except the court officials and our interpreter - not even the child's natural mother. Especially not the natural mother. The low number of adoptions in Britain is partly because the relevant acts require families to be kept together whenever possible. A birth-mother has rights.

The Russians have no truck with this. This one had given hers away, three times. And that, as far as they are concerned, was that. Sue Curren's report, translated into Russian at vast expense (to us), sat on the judge's desk. But the hearing was ritualised, even formulaic. We were asked why we wanted to adopt Victoria. I said we had room in our home and our hearts for a baby. I promised we would do our utmost to ensure she fulfilled her potential. The judge went out and, 20 minutes later, returned to give her consent on behalf of the Russian Republic. That afternoon, we went back to the orphanage and cuddled Victoria on a different basis, as our daughter. There were no second thoughts now.

Which was lucky. A new birth certificate was immediately issued in her new name by the city registrar, a matronly lady who made a little speech about how grateful the city was to us. Did we want to change her name? We had no plans to call her anything other than Victoria; and the nurses had nicknamed her "Vika" (which has stuck). We changed her middle name to Betty, after my mother, and her last name to Engel. Under Russian law, her old birth certificate was destroyed. We were even given the option, which we declined, of changing her birth date. We know quite a bit about Victoria's background, and why she had to be adopted. It will be no secret from her.

As she grows, we will let her absorb it. But it is her story, not mine, and for her to tell when she chooses, not me. For her, the past is another country. The following morning the nurses took off her orphanage clothes, dressed her in the warm outfit we had brought, and handed her over. A couple of them were crying. "The merriest girl in the orphanage," one sniffled. Everyone kissed everyone else. We took Vika back to the hotel room and, as instructed, put her down for her nap at noon precisely. She finally dozed at tea-time.

Most of the time she was just guzzling. Between whiles, she would stare up at us both, and grin toothlessly. It took me a couple of vodkas to cotton on. All along, I had been thinking of Victoria as a series of problems that had to be overcome. But she wasn't a problem. She was a solution.

We flew to Moscow - the three of us. We sent joyous word to Laurie, staying with friends back home, that he had a sister. But the last part was something we had been dreading all along. We had to gain entry clearance for Vika to come home with us - we had to deal with the British again. There also needed to be a medical report. Children being taken to America for adoption have to be accompanied by a simple form, in keeping with the coffee-and-carrot-cake spirit of the enterprise. They are checked to ensure they are free of terrible diseases, then go off to the Embassy, are processed rapidly, and welcomed to the Land of the Free.

The Land of Bossy Officials requires a form of infinitely greater complexity. The American Medical Center in Moscow, which deals with the ailments of expats and the local rich, said it had to be handled by a senior paediatrician, who agreed to see us on the Friday morning. This was no bad thing: we needed reassurance about Vika's condition. And there would be just enough time to rush the form over to the Embassy before it shut for the weekend. There it would join the 22 other documents that had to be faxed to London before permission could be granted.

I should have seen the blow coming. I had approached the business of adoption as I approach life: with constructive pessimism. Expect the worst, I believe, and you can spend a great deal of time being pleasantly surprised. Anticipate trouble, and it may not happen. I never anticipated this. A nurse took Vika's measurements; the doctor consulted his charts, and watched her crawl across the floor. He asked a few questions. Then he started an involuntary nervous titter. She has a very small head, he said. She was way off the bottom of his charts, not even in the lowest percentile of normal development.

That, he felt, meant that she would probably be educationally sub-normal. Then there was the question of the leg. The leg? It's spastic, he said. That was the word he used. But look, we said, she's crawling much earlier than most babies. And pulling herself up. That wasn't unusual, he replied. Babies with a stiff leg often did this quickly; it was a form of compensation. Again and again, I asked him questions designed to get him to back off a little: to say he might be wrong, that head-size wasn't the answer to everything, that many things were still mysterious. But he didn't think anything was mysterious at all. He was sorry. Why? Why? Why? Why hadn't we checked her out properly in advance? Physical handicap, I could perhaps accept. Mental handicap even. But both? How had we let this happen?

At the first opportunity, I stormed out of the clinic in the hope of leaping in our car and just being driven, fast. But at that moment, perhaps the worst of my life, Gennady, the driver assigned to us by Cradle Of Hope, the sort of bear-like Russian you don't pick fights with, had decided to shove off. He was gone for 20 minutes, the longest piss in history. We had to be at the Embassy by 12.30pm or we couldn't get the papers there till Monday. Helen, the translator, said it would take 45 minutes to get there. Gennady came back at 12.05, muttering.

It was an awful journey, with Helen, not quite reading the mood, pointing out tourist sights. But we got to the Embassy in time. And there the staff were terrific: friendly, helpful, content to sort the 23 documents and fax them to London as fast as they could. We were a bit of a novelty: no British family had adopted a Russian child in six months. And through the day we had a slow recovery.

A senior Cradle Of Hope official was in Moscow. He dismissed the bad news at once. Small head? Not uncommon in orphanages. Bad leg? Physiotherapy will fix it. He arranged for a Russian paediatrician to come round next day. By then, Hilary and Vika had been billeted in a small flat with a local family, while I had gone back home to look after Laurie, to a chorus of reassurance - led by the Martells - that the American Medical Center was notorious among adopters for precisely this kind of diagnosis. And indeed we kept getting little droplets of better news. The Russian paediatrician re-measured Victoria's head, found that it was a centimetre larger than the Americans had said and that they had not taken prematurity into account. That made her head small but not tiny.

Vika then crawled across the floor for her. There was no sign of stiffness. Something occurred to Hilary. At the clinic, there had been a cold lino floor and Vika had been wearing only a vest. Hilary decided that she had been trying to keep at least one of her knees warm. Next day, Hilary took her to another Western doctor who examines a lot of orphanage children.

He concluded: "The child is bright-eyed, alert, curious, social and active... I think full and easy weight-bearing, and crawling, at eight months practically rules out serious neurological or orthopaedic problems. I have no reason to believe that the child is other than perfectly healthy." And that remains the consensus to this day. That does not make the original opinion wrong. It still haunts me. But five experienced doctors have seen her, and none has agreed with it. Our health visitor at home was the briskest on the subject: "This child has been over-analysed. Just look at her. She's fine." That's jumping ahead.

We couldn't really do anything with Vika until we got her back to England. And, on the Monday morning, I rang the desk officer at the Department of Health to see if the papers had arrived. They hadn't. They had to go from the Moscow Embassy to the Home Office to the Department of Health Adoption Unit to an inspector and all the way back again. "My wife's in Moscow where it's 20 below zero, staying in a tiny flat with a tiny baby. I have a small son who's desperate to see them. Can you please help?" In a 50s Carry On film, the desk officer would have been played by Joan Sims at her most nasally contemptuous: "You knew all this in advance, Mr Engel. You could have sent your legal representative to Russia instead." My legal representative happens to be my brother.

What was he going to do with Vika in Moscow? Breastfeed her? The desk officer then posted me the department's official guidelines: she highlighted the section that said it might take six weeks for temporary admission to be granted. And still the papers were nowhere to be found. The Home Office was undergoing a complete re-organisation. Never famously supple, the operation had apparently seized up. I believe the original 23-page fax from Moscow had lain where it landed in an empty office. The official listed as being in charge of the section did not, according to the switchboard, actually exist. Curiously, their chaos probably worked to our advantage in the end.

The Moscow Embassy was brilliant - phoning and chivvying, even re-sending the 23-page fax three times until it finally found a human. From that point, the Department of Health were highly efficient, and I'm grateful. And the Home Office gave the Embassy delegated powers to make a decision. I think that meant: "Oh crikey. You bloody sort it out then." Which they did, rapidly. It took six days, not six weeks. It would have been six hours if we were Americans. But, as with so many other aspects of this story, we were a great deal luckier than we might have been. Hilary and Vika didn't have such a bad time, actually. The journalistic community of Moscow, led by the Guardian's James Meek, his wife Yulia, and the Reeves family of the Independent, wrapped them against the worries of the wintry city.

On the same Aeroflot flight, a week after me, they were at Heathrow. And the moment he saw her, Laurie fell head over heels in love with Vika. "The best present I've ever had," he calls her. So now we are four, and it's wonderful. No bureaucrat will split us now. The process of love is a mysterious one, but it seems as instinctive with an adopted child as with any other. She is eating like crazy, and growing fast. Our relatives and friends are all besotted with her, because she is such a happy and responsive baby. Some of our acquaintances (male, mostly) have more difficulty. One of my colleagues put the phone down on Hilary when she said we had adopted a child. Another said, with genuine puzzlement, "Am I supposed to congratulate you?"

I will fight to protect my daughter and to change a system that is patently ludicrous. Who would have benefited had Vika stayed in the orphanage? How many children have been left half-starved and families unfulfilled because British bureaucracy is so absurdly complex? A Commons bill is about to make changes: so far as I can see, it will have little effect and may make some things worse. Vika can decide for herself whether we did the right thing when she finds out the facts. It can be no secret that she is adopted: Hilary could hardly have got away with stuffing a pillow up her jumper in our gossipy community. And why should it be secret? Victoria is extra-special, and I think she knows it. I have a game with her that only Daddy is allowed to play. I lift her up to the ceiling and she holds her arms out wide. I ask her how she got here and say "By aeroplane!" And she beams.