It hasn’t even got a roof on it yet, and my five-year-old is already planning the kitchen and where to put the potted plants. I love his enthusiasm, and it’s reassuring to know that all my efforts, and the seemingly inordinate amount of time it’s taking, are not in vain!

Fitting it in around work and parenting, I’m probably only averaging 2 hours per week. It’s been a work in progress for about 2 months, but it’s finally starting to look like more than just a haphazard assembly of repurposed pallets and other off-cuts.

I’ve departed a little from my original idea of an asymmetrical, crooked design, in part because of the practicalities and the materials I have to hand, but also because my children were not so excited by that idea. Preferring something with straighter lines and that might pass for a tree-house… if we had a tree to put it in.

In the end it will be rustic, and most likely covered in, and surrounded by plants, perhaps with some bright colours here and there. Or maybe not. It’s an evolving project with no specific plans.

I’m following my gut, day by day, and adapting it to the available resources, which fortunately are appearing more or less as and when I need them from  number of local sources, mostly via friends colleagues and neighbours.

Here are a few photos of my progress so far.

It’s a metaphor of course. Another quote I’ve been inspired by recently, having discovered the series ‘Mozart in the Jungle’. Used more than once by the series’ protagonist Rodrigo, the creative-yet-slightly-lost-genius, hired as the new conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra, it is meant to mean, ‘play with passion!’ In a musical sense, that entails not only calling upon your formal training and knowledge of theory to follow the notes on the page, but to pour your soul into the melody, feel it, breathe it, and in that moment, live it. Be the music, don’t merely play it.  

I find myself yet again inspired by the idea of surrender to and immersion in a creative pursuit. The idea of living for and from your talents, and from something other than the status quo of average employment and minimum wage.  I’ve been listening to more classical music this week and yesterday I went out with my two small children on a chaotic shopping trip to buy the remaining tools, screws, and nails that I need to finish, or at least make some good progress on the playhouse project that I began a few weeks ago and have been chipping away at in a very piecemeal fashion around work and everything else. I shall have to wait until Monday and the return to school before I can dedicate another couple of hours to it.  

That’s a small project, out of which I’m getting a good deal of slow burning pleasure, but what I’m really talking about here is an urge, no, a need to use a deeper level of my being more consistently. Daily, in my work, on my own, with my children, with my wife. I hate to admit that the majority of my life has become a reaction to circumstances. Bouncing from one ‘job’ to the next out of necessity without any thought given to whether or not I actually want to spend my time doing that work. A reaction to the demands of parenthood. The constant planning around school timings, meals, bedtimes. Occupying the children, encouraging them to occupy themselves, planning activities, booking time off work, not having the money or energy to make the most of it. Resenting work. Being frustrated with myself. Impatient for change. Improvement. Insufficiently decisive. Totally unsatisfied on a personal level. From wife and family, I could not wish for better. I have all the love and support at home that I could ever hope for, and more. It is from myself that I should ask more. And ask differently. I’ve not been asking enough of the right questions. 

What do I want? What inspires me to action? Where are my interests? Why am I not following any of them professionally? What is preventing me from doing more of something I love, or that I´m at least interested in? How can I inject more blood into my life? Live with more passion, more inspiration. Channel my energy more effectively. Appreciate, and use well, the time that I have, every day. Find the joy in living a fulfilled life. 

My first job, at the age of 16, was on the twilight shift at weekends, stacking the shelves of a huge wholesale store called Makro. 7 hours per week, after closing time at the weekend, replenishing everything from cleaning products to whisky. I still have some vague memories of the smell of a dropped crate of beer, scented toilet paper, the chink of glass bottles, the rustle and thump of a family sized bag of crisps flying through air, the beep beep beep of a reversing forklift truck and the ever-present rattling trundle of the ‘dogs’, our affectionate name for the pallet trucks that were always at our heels. 

I remember one or two of the faces, a couple of the names, a balding older guy with a grey moustache who drove the forklift. I can’t remember any of the managers who were charged with organising a bunch of unruly teenagers into some semblance of a functioning team. We must have been a nightmare. It was my first taste of independence. Earning my own wage, albeit a pitiful one, less than £5 per hour, maybe even less than £4, a flavour of what it means to go out to work like an adult. It felt like a badge of honour to wear as I returned to school on Monday having worked for my living over the weekend. I still needed to be dropped off and picked up by my parents of course. 

During my school holidays I passed through several very forgettable temporary clerical assignments. So forgettable in fact that I was only reminded of the fact when I came across a reference that I took with me to Australia just in case I might need it, although perhaps I shouldn’t have bothered… 

‘He compiled a catalogue of training videos (VHS for those of you who remember), which comprised sorting them out from a box and relocating them into a cupboard and typing a list of titles and subjects which made it easier to identify which video was which. 

I would willingly employ him in a similar capacity.’ 

Needless to say, I avoided office work like the plague on my travels. 

The last job I had the pleasure of experiencing before leaving the UK and my adolescence behind was ‘Forecourt Customer Assistant’ in a motorway service station. Highlights included checking the sell by dates of prepacked sandwiches, plastic wrapping the top-shelf magazines and arranging them out of reach of cheeky children, dealing with an angry truck driver who emptied his fuel tank onto the forecourt floor because he put the wrong fuel in, and attempting to understand a busload of Glaswegian football supporters. Another job I was never to repeat. It was also one of my father’s first jobs, one he held on to for a number of years as he paid his own way through his professional education. My three months of overtime, the occasional double shift and hugely reduced social life paid for a big holiday. 

On a recent visit to my parents’ house, my father impressed upon me the urgency of sorting out (removing) some of my old things. He needs more space for his tools and golf clubs I suppose. In reality it was only two boxes, and most of it went in the bin. Amongst some of the treasures that I decided to keep however were 10 albums of photos (after some serious editing), my diaries, hard copies of all the emails exchanged between myself and my parents, and some letters from friends that I received whilst travelling around Australia for a year, beginning in November of 1998. The famous ‘gap year’ between secondary school and university. A voyage of self-discovery as you leave behind your adolescence, and return as a fully-fledged adult, having accumulated enough ‘real world’ experience to continue on the path to further education, and eventually the world of paid employment.

Well, it wasn’t quite like that. I haven’t yet (re)read the diaries, emails or letters, but as I remember it, the biggest thing that trip did for me, was to whet my appetite for more exploration. Another three years passed before I tried university, which was a failed experiment, and I never did enter any formal career path. I’ve spent far more time living abroad than in my country of birth since I finished school, and I think it highly likely that I will continue to do so. It’s a funny idea perhaps that I have consistently felt more at home in ‘alien’ environments than in the one I grew up in. That’s not to say I didn’t feel at home in my youth. Quite the contrary, I had a great and very safe childhood, but by my mid-teens, I knew I wanted to experience more. Family holidays certainly planted the seeds of wanderlust, and as I set out on my own for the first time, I would never feel quite the same about returning to my comfortable but all-too-familiar surroundings.

Did I find myself? No. Did I feel ready to further my formal education or start climbing some career ladder? No. Did I have any idea what to do next? No. I think if anything, I felt, if not more so, at least as clueless about my next plans as I was a year before. I left home, rather naively, and a little nervously with two extremely overloaded rucksacks and the idea that this would be the adventure of a lifetime and that I’d have it all figured out, whatever it was, by the time I came back. But that was a long way in to the future. I remember a conversation with my dad after I’d told him that I was planning to disappear off to the other side of the world for a year, during which he reluctantly accepted my decision, but not before asking me to promise that afterwards I’d come back, and go to university. I told him that I couldn´t make that promise, and that a lot could happen in a year. Who knows what or where I’d be by then. He appreciated the honest answer, but I know he was more saddened by the idea of me being so far away, than he was concerned about my lack of career focus. As a father myself now, I can finally sympathise.

I’ll be reliving that trip over the next few weeks and months as I re-read my diaries and correspondence, and I look forward to sharing some of it with you, here.

If you would like it straight in your inbox, then sign up over to the right-hand side of this page.

The windscreen wipers are paranoid. skreek pfaarp, skreek pfaarp, skreek pfaarp, skreek pfaarp. All that for a bit of drizzle. And the damn automatic setting is stuck on. It’s too expensive to get it fixed. Not worth the hassle either. When can I afford to leave the car a whole day with a mechanic? Especially for something so trivial. It is annoying though. Incessant, like the traffic. It takes me an hour to drive to work, an hour and 25 minutes to drive home. Quicker if I finish late and miss the rush hour. Was rush hour ever only one hour? It’s dark, I should be in bed with my wife. Why do I do this? I don’t even like my job. That’s all it is. A job. Not a vocation or a calling, or even anything really worthwhile. A job. It pays the bills. 40 hours a week plus 2 and a half hours a day driving, that´s 52 and a half hours, plus 2 or 3 hours over time. At least 55 hours a week. At least it’s only Monday to Friday. At least I’m not working shifts. I put in my years of shift work. Less driving, and less sleeping too. I still don’t think I’ve fully adjusted to a normal day – night rhythm. The alarm drives me nuts. How can it be that I’m never ready to wake up when I have to? I use my phone. Should I have it so close to my bed at night? Should I have it so close at all? I’d love to be rid of the damn thing. Available 24 hours. Bollocks. I want to be disconnected, off the grid, unreachable sometimes. These days, most of the time. Especially at night. Maybe I should at least put it on flight mode at night. But what if there’s an emergency? Don’t call me, I’m not a doctor. Overtaken by a truck again. They shouldn’t do that. I should be in a faster car; I deserve a better car. When will I earn enough to afford one? How did I get here? To this point in my life. I had bigger dreams than this. What went wrong? Did something go wrong? Or is this really all there is for me? An hour of driving in the dark and the drizzle… it’s heavier now, almost worth the windscreen wipers being on… to be bored or stressed for eight hours or more, to drive an hour and 25 minutes in the dark and drizzle to arrive home exhausted and demoralised. Only to repeat it all again the next day. WTF. 

I just read the book ‘Ask an Adventurer’ by Alastair Humphreys, which was I must say, a very enlightening read. Honest, open, straight forward, and entertaining to boot. I’ve craved adventure for as long as I can remember, and to varying degrees I’ve dabbled in it most of my life. I didn’t achieve the level of risk and madness that I would have loved in my youth, and now, as a family man in my forties, I no longer want that level of intensity, but in my head and my heart I still yearn for the sense of freedom and energy that comes with immersion in nature or a tough challenge. 

As I look back on my adventures, I see that they were for the most part, very controlled experiences in relatively safe environments. My teenage dreams of mountain climbing and big wave surfing (based on no real-life experience of either), and other vague ideas of polar or jungle exploration never came to fruition, due to a lack of real determination to make them happen. Evidently, I didn’t want them as badly as I thought I did. I do have regrets sometimes, about not having done more whilst I was younger, but I’m now mostly at peace with my achievements so far. 

Reading Alastair’s book, and the stories of others who’ve turned adventure into a lifestyle or career, I can identify with the longing for and enjoyment of the suffering (at least in hindsight), and reveling in new experiences and landscapes. I can even have imagined myself speaking and writing for a living to sustain that lifestyle. Perhaps the years have mellowed me, or maybe we evolve through different stages in life, but now I don’t feel that pull in the same way anymore. Not for the big dangerous stuff anyway, nor for anything that requires me to organise my life around an extreme training plan.  

Something else that now plays on my mind to a much greater degree is the environmental impact of such endeavours, and my motivations for wanting to try them. For the most part, it’s exceptionally difficult to mount an expedition that isn’t in some way harmful to the place you’re passing through or the people you encounter, even if the consequences are not immediately obvious. As with my adventure cravings, my environmental concerns have waxed and waned through the years as I dream of becoming self-sufficient whilst still consuming vast quantities of plastic packaging, eating non-organic food, and working in the not-so-environmentally-friendly mass tourism industry. 

Wanting to share adventures with my children is also leading me down a different path. I can’t, or don’t want to put them or myself at too much risk, yet I still want to share some enthusiasm for the outdoors and give them a taste of adventure. To use a term that Alastair coined, it’s time to have some ‘micro-adventures’. Camping in the garden, bike rides along the dirt tracks close to home, fishing trips, bird spotting, rock pools, looking for beetles and lizards under rocks, walking up hills, swimming in the sea. For the little ones, it´s all an adventure, and I need to learn to look at life that way too. 

You need to travel if you want to be a travel writer, right? Well, I want to travel more, and I want to be a writer, but for now, I’m not doing much travelling, so now what?

Maybe I don’t have to physically travel to be a travel writer. Maybe I can write about my current home as if I was travelling through it. Try to see it with new eyes. I could also revisit some memories and diaries from journeys past. Would that count?

A journey can be many things. Physically moving through geographical space. Exploring your own life; searching for purpose, pleasure or challenge. Following a path of spiritual, intellectual or athletic development. Looking at it that way, we’re all on a journey of some sort or other. Travellers, all of us. Does that then mean that those of us who write are all travel writers? Or perhaps some would be better described as travelling writers? And does it matter?

There is a lot of emphasis in the world of ‘personal development’ about specialisation. You must label yourself in order to stand out above the crowd. I AM (insert name) AND I DO (insert chosen speciality) REALLY WELL! I even heard one seemingly very experienced and highly paid commercial writing coach, saying that to label yourself merely as a ‘writer’ was a sure way to fail at being one (professionally).

For a while, not knowing what badge to wear held me back. I wanted to be a writer, perhaps even a travel writer, but I didn’t believe myself to be specialised enough nor ‘expert’ enough to be one. I was essentially waiting for myself to become an expert writer, before becoming an expert writer. Confused? I certainly was.

Perhaps I could call myself a stay-at-home writer, or a looking-out-the-window writer, or a practicing-to-be-a-writer-for-the-day-I-start-travel-writing writer. I could definitely call myself a writing-when-I-find-time-between-parenting writer.

I decided that it doesn’t matter, because if it did, then I would never get started, and if I never get started, I won’t get anywhere.

So my advice to myself : Don’t stress about labelling yourself, just get on with what feels right, and worry about what to call it later.

…was quite a surprise. I’ve never worried about my age, nor felt the need to mark the passing of the decades with big celebrations or self-deprecating humour. Just numbers. That’s all it is, and I really do feel that way. So, I’m sure that it’s nothing to do with being of an age that begins with a 4 now, but things are definitely not the same as they were 10 years ago. 

I must now pay much more attention to my overall health and well-being… what and how I eat, my posture, my physical fitness, my mental and emotional states. I’ve always been a ‘thinker’ but I’ve never thought too seriously about any of these things before. Passing through my mid to late 30s, training less, becoming a family man and resenting work more and more, the imbalances in my life began to manifest themselves physically and psychologically. 

Postural issues accompany recurring yeast infections, and I even had some intolerance issues with dairy for a few months; that however seems to have passed. An optician I visited in my early 20s told me I needn´t worry too much about my eyes, but that when I reach 40, I may need reading glasses. Turns out she was right. I now wear glasses for reading and using screens.  

Somehow the invincibility of youth has given way to a previously unacknowledged recognition of a real need to be aware and take care of myself.  Some focused thought and effort are required to bring myself back on track and back to myself. 

Perhaps this is connected to my current existential crisis. A longing for more fulfilment and purpose. A need to relieve the stress of living pay cheque to pay cheque, and to find the time or focus to just be present. To be relaxed with myself, my wife or my children.

I would like to rediscover myself in my 40s. Ground myself. Be present. Share my abilities with the world. Be myself, for myself, so I can better contribute to the lives of those around me.

Of course, this is an outdated cliche. Ships no longer need to see each other to avoid collisions, having replaced lanterns and loud noises for radar and GPS, and even us humans have replaced our need for a direct line of sight with instant messaging and so-called ‘social’ media. You get my meaning though. My wife and I spend most of our time passing from one task to another, crossing paths briefly in between.  

I’m working, she’s studying. She’s working, I’m with the kids. I take one kid skateboarding whilst she takes the other one shopping. She’s making dinner whilst I’m playing with Lego on the living room floor. I take the younger ones to bed so she can have some time with the teenager, and we meet in the bathroom for teeth-cleaning, where we exchange a brief summary of our respective days, before making sure that everyone is still in the right bed, under the duvet, and that there are no draughts sneaking in under the curtains, carrying with them the threat of another ear infection or lingering cough. 

At this point I just want to collapse into bed, whilst Julia, having finally stopped moving, kicks into off-load mode, reeling off today’s frustrations and worries, before thinking (usually out loud) through the worries and frustrations of tomorrow. I often drift off at some point in the conversation and my snoring and lack of attention become another one of the frustrations. 

There are some differences between us, which become most upsetting at night when exhaustion strips us of the last remaining shreds of the day’s patience. We are both tired, extremely tired, most of the time, but whereas I can put my head on the pillow and sleep, she can’t, and whilst my sleep is deep and difficult to disturb, hers is light and disturbed by the slightest movement of the duvet or change in the rhythm of a child’s breathing.  

I’m often oblivious to the first three times she gets up to comfort a crying child or respond to a call of ‘mamá’, but by the fourth time she’s usually managed to finally wake me up and is pretty pissed off, having only slept in snatches of 20 minutes between interruptions. Her frustrations stem from lack of quality sleep and an incomprehension of my ability to sleep through all but the loudest of noises or roughest of shoves.  

I fully understand her, and I wish I woke up first at least half of the time, but I don’t. and when I’m wrenched out of a deep sleep by a frazzled and seriously grumpy wife, I leap (figuratively speaking) into defensive mode, acting the part of the wounded and unfairly admonished. Sparks fly for a bit, sometimes tears too, and then we collapse back into each other’s arms and yet another conversation ensues, involving repeated apologies and vows to find a solution to this seemingly never-ending succession of chaotic days and insufficiently restful nights.  

Like hurtling along a highway well beyond the speed limit, without a seatbelt and no brakes, only to realise it’s not actually a highway at all, but a narrow country lane with high hedges on both sides and plenty of blind corners. Winnie the Pooh is driving, your airbag is a soft toy called ‘Joey’ that you had when you were 3 years old, and your driving soundtrack is a medley of the ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ and ‘I want to ride my bicycle’ . It’s the adventure of a lifetime, where your Peter Pan complex crash lands in a shower of fairy dust and dirty nappies, and you emerge from your chrysalis with butterfly wings made from ‘sudden and serious responsibility’ into a whole new you… clueless parent extraordinaire. I love it, but my god is it hard work .

Of course my kids are wonderful and I never thought I could love anyone that much, but it’s not all coloured pencils, Play Doh, and the sound of children’s laughter.

I perform a health and safety assessment everywhere we go, silently scanning the zone like some kind of weird robot. My biggest fear where we live are the Agave plants, which have (no joke) life threatening spears instead of leaves. The worst ones are the young plants which are just the perfect height to skewer an unsuspecting child.

Sometimes I go days without an adult conversation, with anyone, my wife included. We find almost no time (except when sleeping) to be a couple, and I find even less time to be just me. A luxury I very much took for granted as a single man.

However frustrating it may be at times though, I couldn’t imagine it any other way… except perhaps with a few more hours in the day to run around on the beach, hike through forests and sit around the table drinking hot chocolate and drawing pictures of our favourite animals. In those moments, when I look in to their eyes, everything else becomes insignificant interference. My children force me to be present in the moment, and remind me that perhaps there is nothing more important than right here, right now . I love my wife, and I love my kids, and that’s what matters most to me.