I’m sitting in my kitchen with my coffee growing cold, and the battery in my radio is dying. It’s… mesmerising. Faint, occasional words slip through the silence like an overheard conversation. I can hardly catch any words now. Just their tone. Feel like an abandoned astronaut slowly drifting off into the dark.

WHY is something like this so beautiful to me? How do I take a cheap radio, cheaper batteries, the slow loss to static of a Radio 4 programme about child tax credit reform of all things… and make of it such a stark image?

I think the stark images are there inside us in the first place. We look for them like patterns, like Fibonacci numbers in the spirals of flower petals or the face of Christ in a piece of bread. We are humanity, we make chaos into order. It’s our thing. Like the old Rorschach inkblot tests showed, what we find in the chaos is more a sign of what’s going on within us than of some external reality. I’d rubbish the idea of “reality” cheerfully but in fact the meaning things have to us may very well be the only meaning things have at all, so I think I might leave it alone. And learn from it, I suppose, as much as I can.

In other news, I’ve now moved on from my cold coffee and a Graze box has arrived courtesy of a friend. Actual bits of Belgian chocolate mixed with actual cranberries. If I am an abandoned astronaut slowly drifting off into the dark, I’ve just remembered I’ve still got my packed lunch. There’s usually a bright side.

If you’d like to be distracted from the futility of mortality, you can get a half-price Graze box here: www.graze.com. Or I’ve got three codes to get one free if you want, just leave a comment.

Here is Johnny finding a certain unexpected meaning in the colour of some cottage windows.

Rough morning. I have fresh bruises all over my arms – you can make a child get dressed, but you can’t make them do it with dignity. People who have little power left to themselves will cling tightly to what is left them. I used to care for an extremely elderly man, a huge Irishman of well over six feet who’d lost almost all of his faculties in his old age. His only way of expressing his frustration was to hold onto his bowel movements until his pad was being changed, and then let the whole lot go at once all over whoever was caring for him. Dignified this was not, but I understood it. It felt like all he had.

For much of my life I’ve insisted on my right to enter the future as through a hedge backwards. I couldn’t resist change but I could damn well make you drag me there. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t help. The child who insist on screaming blue murder while the school uniform is done up ends up with a sore throat and a cross parent. The poor old sod in the nursing home might communicate his displeasure with filthy eloquence, but he, too, ends up covered in shit. And that’s just more stuff to deal with on our way to a future which will no doubt have its own very particular stresses, for which we’ll need every ounce of our focus. I want to arrive there as rested and well as I can. I want to be able to hit the ground running, not still picking leaves out of my hair and complaining about the mess I’ve got myself into.

So, as I’ve said to myself every morning since arriving in Southport, I’ll embrace the change instead. I’ll take the loss and feel it and let it go. I’ll stop fighting, I’ll abandon my mortal delusions of control. I’ll go where I must, and I’ll grow as I should, and when I get there – wherever this winding, stumblesome road is taking me – I’ll be of some practical use. And I won’t be covered in shit.

I’ve said very little in this post. I guess writing it is the power I have left to me. But what’s certain is that it’s entirely likely that I might need hugging during this process. That’s where you people come in.

The Irish bloke died despite his resistance, Charlie went to school, and I still have amazing lips. Some things are unavoidable.

So it’s Thursday. Today I’ve hung out with my son, who is amazed and delighted to find that the first letter of his name is also a semi-circle. Rosie’s at a friend’s so I haven’t seen her. Letters from solicitors continue to fly back and forth as the divorce proceeds. This is a sad time, but my ex is a good and decent person, which helps a lot. I’m reasonably nice myself mind you.

And winter’s heaving in like a great tide of dark and sparkles. I don’t mind the shops veering from Hallowe’en to fireworks to Christmas as though there were nothing between them. I recently wrote an article about fire festivals for RoughGuides.com,  and by god we need them in the winter! Anything to punctuate the gathering dark. I’m more troubled after New Year, when there’s nothing but grey ahead for many months.

But for now, hell, we may as well enjoy ourselves. So there have been pumpkins and bonfires and wrapping excited children up warmly for firework displays. If I do manage to start work, it’ll mean Christmas is a lot brighter. By which I mean there’ll be more stuff. I’m not the best Quaker in the world and living simply  is still far more of a dream than a reality – but it still gives me an unusual degree of peace to hold that before me as my intention rather than something more frantic.

What?

I don’t even know what you want me to say. In fact that’s the problem. You don’t want me to say anything. That’s why I haven’t bothered my arse to blog for a couple of months, because frankly (frankly), who cares what’s happening with me? It bores ME to fucking tears so god only knows what it must be like to try and read this shit.

I’m only writing this NOW because I feel like I should be writing SOMEthing. There are relatively few things I’ve ever been really good at, and writing is one. Or it was, anyway. But I’m tired of waiting for inspiration to come and kick me in the head so from now on I’m just going to use this blog as morning pages till something better happens.

(Morning pages are what my people (pasty middle class douchebags who’ve never done a hard day’s work in our lives) do every morning as part of our pasty middle class douchebag creative practice so that we can write more easily, and if you ever, EVER meet anyone who says “morning pages” you should immediately punch us in the back of the head. Trust me, we deserve it)

My life is still happening. I have a job which I still haven’t started because of things. And stuff. Because of forms and post and all. And I’ve been saying I’m starting soon for about two months now, and I am. My flat is still untidy and I have more friends. My kids are brilliant and better than yours ever will be or could be. Even if you get them every frigging Baby Einstein cd and spend every waking moment on quality time with them, and have a balanced and contented family life and don’t get divorced and teach them the clarinet, your kids will never, never be as good as my kids. Because my kids get distracted halfway through bedtime stories and we spend forty-five minutes trying to build Lego inside a balloon until I remember they’re supposed to be asleep, and you cannot manufacture that kind of parenting. You’ve either got it or you haven’t. Which is to say that I’ve got it. You haven’t.

I’m still gorgeous, too. More so actually. If anything.  That’s not just my opinion, it’s the opinion of the mirror.

I think I’ll stop here, in case I give away any major plot points too soon. Might be back later.

Life goes on. I now have a flat, without furniture, where I curl on the floor in my sleeping bag like a quilted caterpillar. I have no money to speak of because of the endless quest that is applying for benefits. Meanwhile I’m turned down for jobs I could do with both arms broken. It’s hard to see meaning at a time like this.

And then I go to my children. And when I’m with them and really pouring my whole heart into looking after them, something happens to reality. I slide across into an entirely different version of this town, accessible only when I’m accompanied by my kids. That version is filled with parks and the whole day smells of grass after rain and sunlight through trees. And we just stay there for hours, day after day, and I never want to leave. Because this is why I’m here. I love these incredible little people. I love seeing the world through their eyes and understanding their fears and their wants. I love making them laugh. I love being their father.

There is much that needs fixing in my life, but I have two kids I’d die for, and that’s meaning enough for me.

Today I’ve managed to secure a flat. Assuming I can come up with the first month’s rent, I’ll move in next Tuesday. I’m very glad of this. The sofa I’ve been sleeping on has been my ex-mother-in-law’s, and though she’s been kind and supportive it’s not the ideal arrangement. There’s actually a mountain of new busyness to engage me now, not least finding some furniture, but I’ve run out of energy since my unimaginably early start this morning to take the kids to a cheap morning cinema showing. A little too early even for them in the end: Charlie phased out halfway through the movie and we headed home, sadder but wiser.

My daughter in particular was sad to leave the cinema, but then she’d been sad to arrive. Today she’s simply sad. And that’s not unusual for her, or for any of us at the moment (bar Charlie, who goes more mad than sad, but that’s a four year-old thing I think). The family has been through enormous change in the past twelve months, from our separation to our shift to another country, and it would be an odd person who didn’t react to such a break, such a refraction of the normally steady light which sustains our lives. So we are careful with one another. I fetch my ex’s medication when she forgets it, and she might yet have cause to do the same for me. The children are hugged hard and told they’re loved, and we all begin again, some new kind of life in a place none of us really know.

For my part, having my own place will be a significantly empowering step towards the new sense of self I’ll need to survive here. I know that for the kids and my ex, finally having their house meant a very great deal too. There are other parts of ourselves which will be harder to rebuild, but no less important. We have all left close friends behind us and only the kids, with the sensible schoolyard to drive their relationships, have begun to find new networks of support. My ex and I remain largely isolated. In some ways this compels us to work on our friendship, which is important, but we need boundaries there too.

I took this picture of some rotten stonework in Glasgow several months ago. It was only this morning that the sign in the top right finally came into focus for me, as if I'd hidden it from myself in anticipation.

I’ve more or less given up on trying to manage or understand human relationships. I press on with my life instead and hold onto some kind of trust that these things tend to happen when we’re not looking for them. I seem to be doing a lot of trusting over the past year. I was never clear who or what I was actually placing my trust in, but I think I see now who I really must begin with.

I think it’s probably me.

This is my fifth day in Southport. So far I’ve seen four flats, three of which don’t allow children, and one which allows them but has regular break-ins. The days have been busy and warm, and the nights extremely bleak. I’m slowly gaining confidence in my ability to get things done though. This is gently lessening the bleak.

I hope that beginning a brand new blog (into which I’ll eventually import my last one) will give me some kind of grounding here. Everything I knew has gone out from under me, and I need grounding. I’ll probably explain more about my position as time goes on, but I’m here essentially because of my kids. After my ex and I split, she decided to move here to be nearer her mum, so I had to make the move too. On the whole I quite like Southport but it still seems strange to imagine that I’ll be living here for the foreseeable future. Southport is a seasidey sort of place, quite a bit posher than Blackpool, which gleams and leers at her across the bay. It’s attracted well-to-do retirees since Victorian times and the town centre is still based round a cheerful, kitsch collection of canopied shops. Like the gold rush in 1800s America, the care, management and shepherding of elderly people are pretty much boom industries nowadays so whatever work I find will probably have something to do with them. I’m staking a claim in the Old Rush.

There’s a kind of pressure in my head today which isn’t making things easy. It’s an old friend and it comes from overcomplicating my life. I’m hoping there’ll be simplicity and joy ahead rather than the noise and disorder I’m in at the moment, sleeping on someone’s couch and looking after my kids in between scuffles with local bureaucracy.

But the kids are the centre of my life here as they have been since they were born. It’s hard to think of anything I do as naturally and happily as fatherhood, and I’m beginning to relax now that this most important part of myself is back in place. In the name of continuing peace and progress, I think I might just take the flat with the regular break-ins. I like meeting people.