On the other major thing in my life

I've been writing about football for eighteen and a half years, and I intend to continue to do so. But it's time to explore something else as well.

It is reasonable to say that I didn’t expect to become a father. The positive pregnancy test came through about 16 or 17 days after the wedding. Had you asked me 16 or 17 days earlier, I would likely have scrunched my face into a ball and scoffed at the possibility of it all. After all, I’d been having relationships of some sort or another for the previous quarter of a century and no babies had emerged from any of these, but when faced with the fact of a positive pregnancy test my attitude became somewhat clearer; you’re in this now, so you may as well embrace it to the fullest extent possible.

The tenth anniversary of this milestone comes in three months time, and it’s fair to say that quite a lot has changed. Firstly and most significantly, not only has that tiny speck on an ultrasound developed into a fully functioning kid, but he’s been joined by another one, also (thank God - I have so much empathy for parents whose children aren’t and have nothing but love for them) fully functioning.

I no longer have a wife, and my ex-wife no longer has a husband, a situation which suits both of us just fine. The divorce is to complete on the 20th September at noon, but at this juncture it's really little more than an administrative exercise. There has been no relationship for at least seven years. We co-parented for a long time, living in the same property until September 2022. For more than three years, I slept on a sofa. It didn’t feel like much of a way for anybody in their 40s to be living, but it was what I had and I tried to make the most of it.

But when the time came to move from push to shove, there was really only one direction that I was ever going to take. My ex-wife and I both dearly love our children, but it was clear from the outset that it was in everybody’s interests for them to stay with me the majority of the time. In the same month as my 50th birthday, therefore, I became a single parent.

I had no idea whether I would be able to do this, but from a logical point of view it made perfect sense. West Sussex County Council persist with the idea that infant, middle and high schools are the best way to educate kids, and this means that despite there only being two years between my two, they have been at different schools for almost the entirety of their education.

The house that we live in—one in which I even had my own bed—is equidistant between the two. I also earned more than my ex-wife, and on top of this the pandemic and a change of job had allowed me to reshape my entire life to work from home. It wouldn’t be easy, but it made pragmatic sense to work it this way around.

Two years on, I’m still standing. More has changed since then, most notably losing my job and setting myself up as a freelancer, and it has been far from easy. But it has also become an essential part of who I am. There are plenty of other dads waiting in the playground to collect their kids, but I don’t know how many of them are, as they say in the coolly clinical way in which such matters tend to be discussed, the ‘primary carer’.

There are plenty of single dad groups dotted around social media, but they are largely inhabited by weekend or every other week dads. It has, at plenty of times, been grindingly difficult and lonely. But I have reached a point at which there is a support network there of people who care, people in whose direction I can vent, people who are prepared to listen. There have been points at which those people have probably saved my life.

Through all of this, there is one thought that has permeated through my brain more than any other. No regrets. It is, I’m prepared to admit, a thoroughly contradictory state of affairs. There is little doubt that getting married was the worst decision I’ve ever made, but I’ve had to reconcile this with the very fact that the result of this has been (at least) the two most beautiful and important people I’ve ever encountered. It’s given me a feeling of purpose that I’d been missing for most of my adult life. If it altered this upshot, the truth of the matter is that I wouldn’t change a thing.

Of late, I’ve come to recognise that I’m not feeling the football in the way that I have for the overwhelming majority of my life. I have been writing regularly about the game for eighteen years now, and I still love doing it. But something about football has changed in a way that I find increasingly intolerable. Whether its regressive states buying in with the intention of laundering their reputations, the increasingly toxic influence of money, crypto scams being promoted openly by clubs, schedules being squeezed and squeezed until there is no breathing space at all, spiralling ticket prices, or players acting like pieces of shit, it’s become increasingly difficult for me to flip the lid of my laptop open and just hammer out a thousand words in the way that used to feel so natural to me.

Increasingly, especially this year, it has felt as though I needed a change, and the upshot of all that is this. I’m certainly not going be giving the game up. As you all already know, we’re off to a match this very afternoon. But I have also come to recognise that I need something more, and that I can spread my wings and explore other areas of writing as well. So that’s what I’m going to do, both on here and on Instagram. My circumstances are peculiar, and that gives me a huge area that I can cover.

So I‘m going to write about it. I’m going to attempt to articulate how it feels, how it holds together, the challenges and the joys of this incredibly tiring but still completely fulfilling adventure that I’m still on. I’ll obviously give the kids themselves as much anonymity as I can manage. You never know for sure where this sort of thing might end up. But at the same time, I think there’s a space for me to do this. We’ve allowed pernicious tattle about ‘divorce’ to become mainstream in recent years, and we often don’t seem to give much consideration to damage that such discourse can cause.

There are a lot of genuinely lonely people out there, their time pushed to breaking point by the rigours of what we have to do and the need to centre others to the point at which it significantly detriments us. I hope to reach out to those people regardless of gender, to write in a way that they will recognise and which will give them an understanding that no, you’re really not alone.

But this is will also really be for the single dads out there. I don’t know how many of you there are, but I do know the things that are routinely said about us and that for all that so many men seem to be some form of danger, there are also many more of us who are just bumping along, trying to do the right thing and make the right decisions at some of the most emotionally testing points of our entire lives.

This isn’t going to supplant the football writing on this Substack. If anything, I’m hoping for the opposite; to reignite that flame and grow that again as well. But it does mark a small shift in emphasis for this place and I wanted to express that change to you. The people who subscribe to this place are among the most important people I have, and I want to do the best that I can by you. I hope you enjoy this journey. I’ll try to make it as entertaining as I can for you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, the house is quiet and I have the opportunity of another hour in bed before Saturday starts. This is going to be one hell of an adventure.