Writing on
Writing about the things that sit outside a job title — family, health, habits and the slow business of working out what actually matters.
For three years I have taken each of my children away separately, three to five days at a time, doing whatever that one actually loves. The first day is always ordinary. Something happens around the third that I have never managed to get any other way.
4 min read by Chris Cooper
Read more4 min read
The second half of a story I stopped short on earlier this year. We fixed the food first and deliberately left exercise alone until it was holding — and the order turned out to matter more than either of us expected.
4 min read
Next month I start a month of riding for Prostate Cancer UK. The riding is the easy half. The asking is the part nobody writes about, and it is harder when you have no personal story to hold out.
4 min read
We said goodbye to our old labrador in March, after nearly sixteen years. The puppy who followed him is three months old, nothing like him, and quite strong enough to make a forest walk a negotiation rather than a stroll.
4 min read
I have three layers of friends and have only recently been honest with myself about the first one. What saved the innermost layer was not effort or good intentions. It was a fixed slot in the week, and a game none of us will admit to in public.
4 min read
Sixteen years married, and the thing that changed us did not arrive as a crisis. It arrived as a set of holiday photographs neither of us could look at, and a long drive home in which we agreed to stop doing it on our own.Sixteen years married, and the thing that changed us did not arrive as a crisis. It arrived as a set of holiday photographs neither of us could look at, and a long drive home in which we agreed to stop doing it on our own.
4 min read
A fear I picked up in about a minute as a child and spent thirty years failing to shift. Trying was never the problem. What finally worked was my youngest daughter, going at my pace for as long as it took.
4 min read
An independent income does not arrive in a line. It arrives in lumps, with gaps, and the gaps are never where you planned them. What surprised me is how little of that ever reached my family materially — and how much of it reached them anyway.
4 min read
Three children, and the leaving has not happened all at once. One has moved north and built a life of his own. One is close enough that we still get the news while it is news. One is still at home, and growing up faster than I had planned for.
4 min read
Before consulting, before software, before large-scale programmes, and long before I understood what kind of career I wanted, I had a short but powerful chapter in the forces.
