LEARNING THE ART OF LIVING WELL
My son woke me up this Father’s Day with an unexpected poke in the back and an unexpected selection of gifts and a card he had made himself. It seems he had been squirrelling things away for me. When I opened the old shoe box wrapped with string I found an eclectic mix of things […]
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On our way to school earlier this week, I started joking around with my son like I do most days. ‘I can’t wait to find out what you’ve got me for Father’s Day,’ I told Jackson. ‘When’s Father’s Day?’ he replied. ‘Oh wow, you’re good,’ I smiled. ‘But I know the truth. I know you’ve […]
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Just over two years ago, I decided to take my then six-year-old son to Barcelona for the weekend. It had struck me that, while all my friends and colleagues frequently went away with the partners and families to exciting places, we had kind of got left behind. Not by them – I never wait around […]
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I remember my dad once telling me, ‘One day you’ll realise that none of this stuff matters.’ I can’t remember what age I was at the time but I am confident that he was right. I know this because I have no recollection of what we were talking about. Doubtless, I was making a big […]
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Buying my first home at the age of 33 should have felt amazing. Perhaps especially because it was in London – a place where so many young people are totally priced out of the property market. I felt ice-cold when I was handed the keys, though. I’d been renting for years, first with friends and […]
Read MoreImagining what people might be thinking of you, when you stop to consider it, is a complete waste of time. They could be thinking almost anything. It’s what you think of yourself that really matters. MAN ALIVE | LEARNING THE ART OF LIVING WELL
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Idiosyncrasies are what make individuals so interesting, but they can also make them really annoying if they are totally at odds with your own learned and acquired behaviours. I find few things more uncomfortable than over-enthusiasm and gushy praise for ordinary things – like, say, waxing lyrical about something that appears, tastes, sounds or feels […]
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Travelling with someone you love is just like living with them, only more intense. I remember being in Laos with my late wife once and realising she hadn’t said a word to me for two days. She would go through occasional periods of silence back at home in London – usually when she had done […]
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Much to my surprise, I found this next entry in the notes on my iPhone yesterday afternoon. It was entirely written by my son on the first day of our six-week trip round Italy last summer, when he was just seven years old. I’ve tweaked the grammar slightly, but otherwise this ‘part two’ is in […]
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‘We can do this can’t we, Jackson?’ ‘Yes, Daddy. We can do this together.’ I asked my son this fairly rhetorical question when he was two and half years old and I was totally lost, trying to hold everything together just five months after his mum’s premature death. His response, I’ve since discovered, was characteristically […]
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Coming soon: what life taught me when I left my job to spend the summer with my seven-year-old son. Here he is waiting patiently for his daily gelato in Florence.
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A shorter version of this piece about was first published in The Times in July 2018, before the trip detailed below. One of the hardest things about being a sole parent, I keep telling anyone who will listen, is that you have to make all the major life decisions alone. “I can’t imagine how difficult that must […]
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MAN ALIVE 