January into February 2020
This piece gathers a small group of posts from early 2020. At the time, it felt like a fresh start: home education, slower days, more time together, and a chance to build something around Karta rather than forcing him to keep fitting into systems that no longer felt right.
Published 21 October 2019
After years of turmoil and uncertainty, we are finally on the move.
When we first moved to Thanet in 2007, the area felt like an outpost to me.
It was far enough from my former life, both in distance and atmosphere, that it felt like another world. For a while, that was exactly what we needed.
Over time, though, things changed.
Published 5 June 2019
Being in a financial hole is hard.
There is no point pretending otherwise.
The pressure to provide for your family sits with you every day. It follows you into the kitchen. It follows you into bed. It sits beside you when you open the banking app and try to make numbers behave.
One way to stay sane when everything feels stacked against you is to look carefully at what is still working.
Not in a fake, positive-thinking way.
Just honestly.
Published 9 January 2019
It is a funny thing when something forces you to reflect on the life you are living.
Karta is growing fast.
He is the teenager I always wish I could have been. I probably spoil him, but not in the usual way. I do not have bags of money to throw at him. What I do have is love, attention, and the desire to give him the kind of support I did not always have.
My love for him is something I did not know I was capable of before he arrived.
He is my world.
December 2018 into January 2019
This piece gathers a small cluster of posts from the turn of 2019. They were less about a single event and more about a shift in attitude: work, writing, money, learning, and the need to stop giving time away too cheaply.
Published 21 November 2018
So, I made it to fifty.
The big five-o.
At first, I thought I might not have made the best use of my time on this planet so far.
But I was wrong.
Late 2017 into 2018
This piece gathers a cluster of posts and fragments from late 2017 into 2018. They circled the same questions: money, work, health, social media, family, and the strange pull towards a quieter life. Rather than preserving each one separately, I have gathered them here as a single record of that period. Be warned, this is a long one!
Published 3 December 2017
So I’ve almost made it to the half-century.
Will I manage another fifty?
I like to think I have decent genes. I’ll be fifty next November, which means nearly half a century of roaming around the planet in this big old meat suit of mine.
A friend told me today that someone he had been playing walking football with recently collapsed and died.
He was fifty-four.
He had some underlying medical conditions, but still. Fifty-four. Only a few years older than me.
That got me thinking.
Published 5 November 2017
This post will be short and sweet.
It is time for me to take the sabbatical I have been procrastinating about for the past couple of years.
As you probably know by now, I have an ongoing struggle with social media and how I use it. Many times in the past, I have said I would take a break. Mostly, I wanted to find some space for other things that matter to me.
Written 4th November 2017
A moment of clarity?
Despite my best efforts, I am having a hard time maintaining focus on anything.
It probably does not help that I have a massive head cold and feel like poo. But still, let me break it down.
Since the beginning of the year, I have tried hard to make things work. My ideas remain just that. Ideas. For a while, I thought about starting a few more blogs, then scrapped that idea. I threw myself back into photography, shot a wedding, produced some stock images of Dreamland for a friend, and not much else.