Fragments 2006 - 2016

In retrospect, 2006 was the year things began to turn around, although at the start of the year they were still heading in completely the wrong direction and I had little reason to feel optimistic. The company’s chickens had come home to roost, although, in fact, it was just one big chicken in the form of an £80,000 debt to the Inland Revenue. I was advised by my accountant, my bank manager and another bank manager to put the company into administration, ‘lose’ the debt, and start a new company with the same staff and clients. 

This practice is more common these days but I was appalled by the immorality of the idea and instead took out a ‘CVA’, which gave us three years to repay the debt and allowed us to carry on trading. It was a tawdry process that attracted unwelcome attention from all sorts of business hyenas but it was certainly the right thing to do. 

Almost incidentally to all this, I stopped being a vegetarian after eighteen and a half years. The final decision was the result of a bizarre pincer movement where on the one hand I’d begun to dislike the idea of killing vegetables to eat them – clearly absurd – and on the other, an envy for the food that I gave our cats, Tux and Flea. On Boxing Day, 2006, as we played a game at the dining table, I idly pulled pieces off the cold turkey and ate them. Both the taste and texture were amazing. 

Business began to pick up, meaning we were able to make our CVA payments and also pay everyone else, and that was enough to keep me happy for the time being and I even started to sleep a bit better, too. By 2008, I began to feel we were on a sound footing and that maybe everything was going to be OK. 

I was enjoying my forties, too. After a career where I often felt somewhere between, at worst, fraudulent and, at best, precocious, I found that I'd accepted that I was good at what I did and that I was getting the hang of running a business, too. The old cliché that life begins at forty had an unsuspected truth to it, after all. 

2010 was notable for two reasons. Firstly, it was the year that I was the fittest I’d ever been. At the ripe old age of forty-four, after fifteen years of running and several years of swimming, that spring I ran all my best times and felt fantastic. It still remains an ambition to get back to that level of fitness. The other notable event was that I joined Twitter. I didn’t get it at first but my friend, Neil, encouraged me, telling me it was far better than Facebook, which I quite enjoyed.

Twitter proved to be a double-edged sword. On the plus side, I met – albeit virtually – loads of great and like-minded characters, many of whom came to be real life friends. On the negative, it holed my marriage below the waterline, as my dissatisfaction with routine domestic life spiralled badly out of control, resulting in a brief period of depression, from which I only escaped by having the good fortune to know an excellent counsellor. 

Realising that I needed a creative outlet I started a radio show, Electronic Ears, which gave me a great deal of pleasure, but, all the same, in the autumn of 2012 I moved out of my home for the second time in fifteen years, once again having to deal with the misery of not seeing my children every day. 

So we come to the last three years, which seem almost too fresh for a reminiscence like this, although, of course, it’s all well-documented on Blipfoto. In that time I have taken on the role of chair of governors at the local secondary school, a role which I was very flattered to be asked to accept. I had enjoyed my time as a school governor in the years prior to that but this was a whole new ball game. I was terribly worried at first about letting down the school generally and the head teacher specifically but I think I (nearly) have the hang of it now. 

I have also, of course, met and fallen in love with the Minx during that time. She posted recently about our three years of ‘uncomplicated companionship’, which almost seemed to damn our relationship with faint praise, and yet she’s quite right. It has been an easy happiness for which I’m enormously grateful. Our mutual policy of ‘just say yes’ has seen us going to gigs and festivals, art galleries and theatres, sleeping in shepherd’s huts and converted fire engines, always bickering, and always happier together than apart.

This year I’ve moved back into my house and I find myself in a happy place. It has been - as you will have seen if you’ve been reading my blogs, this week – a rollercoaster ride but I’ve realised that I live for the path less travelled, with all the consequence, good and bad, that that brings. 

It has been a great fifty years, for which I am very grateful. I can’t think about the next fifty but I am giving some thought to my next decade. I wonder what fragments of my life I will be writing about in 2026.