I’ve always been fascinated by the march of time. Expressions like: “time flies when you’re having fun“, “time goes faster the older you get“, “time waits for no man” and the immortal words of Ferris Bueller: “Life goes by pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it” roll off the tongue easily. But since time doesn’t actually speed up and slow down – only our perception of time does – I often find myself wondering why.

When I was a kid the Summer holidays seemed to go on forever. Now the Summer goes by in the blink of an eye and it’s Winter and dark nights before I know it. Likewise a year when I was 12 seemed like a lifetime but now 2 years seems to fly by before I’m used to writing down the current one! I’m already at the stage where if someone asks my age I actually have to sit down and work it out.

My trouble with the increasingly fast passage of time is that I love life, always try to make the most of it and want to make the most of my younger days while I can. So I often ponder why things seem to go so fast now and I think I know the answer.

When you’re 12 everything is new. You’re learning all the time. If you go on holiday it’s a completely new experience. When I’d go camping with my father I’d be looking out of the car window constantly seeing new scenery, looking out for animals, particular cars, looking at every cloud, every hill. I’d be like a sponge absorbing my surroundings. Summer holidays at home would be a constant adventure, every day different. I’d maybe go out on the bikes with friends, go for a walk in the woods or fields near my house, scramble along the rocks on the riverside or a whole host of other things. Since everything was new and different I’d be paying attention all the time and making the most of every moment.

Now that I’m 33 (I had to think about that for a moment) I’ve pretty much encountered every experience I’ll ever encounter – or at least everything I’ve experienced has prepared me for anything I can come up against. If I go into an unfamiliar shop to buy a chocolate bar I’ve done it a million times before, know the routine by heart and can perform the whole transaction without switching my brain on – I’m running on autopilot. When I went into a sweet shop as a kid I was like… eh… a kid in a sweet shop. I’d have no idea what I was going to buy and would be looking longingly at all the selections deciding what to get. I’d have to make sure I had enough money, remember to be polite to the man behind the counter (it always seemed to be a man for some reason) and be ready to deal with anything I wasn’t expecting (maybe a discount on a quarter of strawberry bon bons). Ah, those were the days.

Likewise if I drive into the middle of nowhere camping these days the journey is more of an inconvenience and I’m concentrating on getting to my destination rather than the bit in between (whether I’m driving or not). As a kid my face would be plastered to the window looking at anything and everything (just as well I wasn’t driving really).

I think when you’re a kid you’re learning so much and your attention is in the moment all the time, whereas once you get older you’ve done it all before and so tend to switch your attention off most of the time while your brain runs on cruise control. This is something I’ve been trying my best to avoid since I realised it’s what was happening.

Whenever I take a train to and from Leeds I like to look at the scenery. I’m travelling somewhere and it’s nice to look out the window as I frequently see lots of interesting things. I saw a fox the other day, a heron patiently fishing and I’m fairly sure I’ve even seen the odd deer. But when I look at my fellow passengers most of them are staring into space, their eyes glazed over and their brains switched to the off position. Sure, after a hard day’s work they’re probably tired and looking forward to getting home and (being Yorkshire) having something to eat – but I can’t help but feel sorry for what they’re missing. Every day that you spend with your brain disengaged not noticing the world around you wishing it was 5pm is a day you’ll never get back. Little chunks of time soon add up and before you know it 10 years have passed and you wonder where they went.

When I was a kid my dad used to frequently say “I haven’t seen him in 20 odd years” and I couldn’t perceive such a vast length of time. Now I frequently find myself saying the same thing and thinking how quickly they went. I want in 20 years to reminisce about now but it feel like a long time ago packed with experiences and memories I’ll want to hold onto. Because if I don’t I’ll regret it, want them back, and that just isn’t going to happen. Not so much the march of time but the meandering wanderings of time. It sounds like much more fun!

Everybody gets their 5 minutes of fame don’t they? Well I’m no exception, although unfortunately it’s not the sort of fame you’d use as a chat-up line when attempting to court young women at a local pub. Well, not the sort of real-ale serving pubs I like to go to at least!

The sad fact though is that despite getting my photo in the local newspaper (they spelt it wrong as is the custom), despite being flown down to London for an awards ceremony, despite earning the respect of my peers, despite earning the kudos and admiration of the teachers at my school (there you go, I’m giving it a time-frame now) it seemed that my 5 minutes of fame was to disappear into oblivion. Googling for this momentous achievement – my crowning glory if you will – never returned anything relevant. There’s no Wikipedia page for it (speaking of which, where’s my Wikipedia page?!). Even my award certificate had vanished (assuming I’d ever been presented with one). No, all I had were my memories and I was going to have to bury them and recant the tale to my poor grandchildren in decades time starting with the line “Have I ever told you about my 5 minutes of fame…?”. Like a true grandparent I’ll ignore the moans of despair from them (as they’d heard it a hundred times before) and tell the story anyway. Of course by then I’ll wonder if it ever happened at all or if I’d just imagined it…

However my father is moving house soon and while clearing years of rubbish out he came across my hallowed award certificate. It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that I have indeed had my 5 minutes of fame and yes, despite attempting to join the Royal Marines (and coming damn close), despite playing tough, physical sports like football, despite climbing many mountains and competing in several endurance events, despite having a crew cut for many years (although not at this particular time) – underneath it all I’m a complete geek. I’ve hidden it well but must finally hold up my hands and tell you the truth…

I (and some classmates) won THE TIMES TOURNAMENT OF THE MIND!

“The Times Tournament of the what?” I hear you ask? Well back when I was a kid at school the national newspaper (The Times) ran a competition set by brainiacs Mensa. My memory is vague but I believe that each week a set of questions would be printed and teams of schoolchildren around the country would try to solve them and by some iterative process one team would win outright and earn a prize for their school. If you’ve ever done an IQ test then you’ll know the sort of brainteaser questions they set. You’d get a set of shapes and have to work out what the next one was. Or some puzzle whereby two cars are moving towards each other accelerating by a certain amount to certain speeds and you have to work out where they pass. That sort of thing. They’d get more fiendish and tricky every week to the point where even the teachers (who weren’t supposed to help) would get stumped.

Fortunately myself, 9 of my classmates (who I’m sure were all much smarter than me) and our maths teacher – Ken Nisbet – managed in 1989 to get all the way through to the final and win it! It was quite an experience and considering we were competing against children much older than ourselves I think we did rather well. We won a computer for our school which was a big deal back then along with a trip to London (which seemed a million miles away from St. Andrews at the time).

And that, for the record, is my 5 minutes of fame.

As an aside, Ken Nisbet (who I believe still teaches at the school I went to – you can see him in that photo of the team above) was and no doubt still is quite a character. He had a real enthusiasm for maths and managed to make learning about triangles, calculus and all sorts of other aspects of maths actually seem interesting and entertaining. I really looked forward to his classes. The fact that I’ve managed to build a successful career as a software developer – which at its core is all about maths and problems solving – is thanks in no small part to the way he managed to capture my imagination. It’s easy to live your life and forget the people who actually got you where you are today – but to people like him I owe a great deal of gratitude. Thanks Ken, you’re a star!

When I was on holiday on the Isle of Arran back in August of 2007 I sat down and wrote an article I’d written many times over the years about the death of my mother. I’d wanted to explain what the process of losing her had been like from the first days up until years later when I’d come to terms with it. But every time I sat down to write it I just wouldn’t be happy with it and hit Delete. Not so this time.

I hadn’t really thought about the loss of my mother for a while but for some reason after a day out walking on the hills I just sat down and wrote Losing My Mother (what I believe to be the best piece of writing I’ve ever done) in about half an hour. When I read it back to myself with tears streaming down my face I realised I’d captured the essence of what the experience of losing my mother and learning to live with it was and is like. I handed it over to my good lady (who knew my mother very well and felt the loss almost as much as I did) to proof read (she proof reads most of what I post here believe it or not) and she soon had tears running down her face before agreeing that it was “a lovely article”. Almost immediately I felt like a weight had lifted off my shoulders having put into words what I’d spent the previous 5 years learning to live with.

But it wasn’t until a couple of months later that I actually published the article here and was very tempted to just post it with comments disabled. Fortunately I thought better of it and left comments open and I’m so glad I did. If you have a look at the comments people have left you can see that I’m by no means the only person this has happened to and a lot of people have thanked me for expressing the same things they’ve been feeling and offered their own thoughts too. From my point of view it’s so nice to realise that I’m not alone with other people out there having gone through the same thing as me. It’s given me a great deal of comfort and those people have often said they feel some comfort from what I’ve written.

Friends often ask me why I have this site and why I talk about my life so openly and I can never really answer them other than to say “because I do”. But writing a very personal post for me more than anybody else on a subject I’d not often talk about in the real world (it’s not a good topic to bring up at dinner parties) and getting so much positive feedback, connecting with people I’d never have touched otherwise is a pretty damn good reason if you ask me.

As I’ve written about in detail before I applied to become a Royal Marine Officer when I was younger, cockier, fitter and had better knees. I came within a cat’s whisker of making it and if I’d been even cockier I’d have passed first time. At the time I was particularly proud to pass the Officer selection course which consisted of all sorts of fun activities like press-ups, running with a telegraph pole slung over your shoulder for hours, being dragged through underwater tunnels and discussing politics and world affairs. But when I eventually failed to get in I was really gutted, although looking back it was the best thing that happened to me as it made me realise nothing is mine by right, I have to work for it. Plus now that I’m in my 30′s all that getting shot at in Afghanistan sounds less than the fun I thought it would be in my early 20′s.

Anyway, I digress. This morning a letter turned up from none other than the Ministry Of Defence. It had been sent to my father’s address and he passed it on to me. You may or may not have heard that just the other week a laptop was stolen containing the personal details of some 600,000 people including such things as names, addresses, passport details, national insurance numbers and so on. The BBC wrote about it here. There’s been a spate of missing government laptops being stolen along with CDs containing details of all UK benefits claimants going missing. I always shake my head at the incompetence of the people who lose these things, don’t properly secure data or are so stupid as to send unencrypted CDs through the post!

However according to the letter I received from the MOD, my details were on the laptop that was stolen! Ten years ago I applied to join the Royal Marines and they still have my personal data lying around on someone’s laptop sitting in the back of their car. Idiots!

The letter reassures me that while my passport details, National Insurance number, driver license details, family details, doctors address and National Health Service number might be included in the stolen information, I can rest easy knowing that my bank details were not. Nice! So more than enough information to steal my identity, set up a bank account in my name, create some loans and not repay them, but at least they can’t get at my current account…

Fortunately the passport details they have are no longer valid, my address has changed, as has my doctor. But that’s about it. We don’t think twice before handing over our personal details to various institutions but we never consider the fact that our details might be hanging around in their systems 10 or 20 years later just waiting to be stolen. Having worked in the IT industry for many years I can testify to the incompetence of the vast majority of the people in it and therefore don’t hold out much hope that this sort of problem’s going to go away.

I seem to have spent the past few Christmases suffering from jetlag. Last year I flew back from Australia on Christmas Eve and my brother had just come back from San Francisco which meant that all of us were knackered. A couple of years before that we were in New Zealand. Other years we’d be spending a few days in Yorkshire then trailing up to Scotland to visit my dad which meant driving through snow blizzards praying we didn’t spin off the road and coming back down doing the same thing. Stress stress stress.

So it’s with great pleasure that when asked what I’m doing this Christmas and New Year I can reply that I’m “staying at home”. My dad and brother are coming to visit us, then they’re going back and leaving us to relax and actually enjoy a peaceful holiday at home! As you can see (pictured above) I’m getting in the spirit already by putting the star on the tree. My good lady finished the job but at least I did something!

I’m not hugely into Christmas myself – I always say that Christmas is for kids. The wonder and anticipation I felt as a child waiting for Santa to come around followed by the delight and joy of opening presents isn’t the same when you’re an adult and you already have all the things you want (except underwear – you can never have enough). Better to use Christmas to pass on that wonder, anticipation, delight and joy to them instead. God help the poor things if I ever have kids!

My mother died just over 5 years ago from cancer and not a day goes by that I don’t miss her. I thought it was about time I wrote about how losing her has changed the way I see the world, has changed me and what it’s been like trying to get my head around it all.

It’s true what they say, you can never really understand what it’s like until it happens to you. I once described losing my mother as like the sky suddenly falling down. My mother carried me for 9 months, gave birth to me, was the first sight I ever set my eyes upon, fed me when I was hungry, got no sleep for months when I woke her up crying at night, changed my nappies, watched me smile when I recognised her face, start to crawl, take my first steps, say my first word. She was always there for me, every memory I’ve ever had growing up has her in it. When I was upset she was there to cheer me up. When I needed advice it was her I sought out. And when I stepped out of line it was her who put me back in step. She was a strong, loving mother who I always knew was on my side, would do anything for me and my brother and gave us the perfect upbringing that made us the men we are today. I’d known her as my mother and as I became and adult I knew her as the woman Jean Conners with a devilish sense of humour and a certain innocence about her. She was the most wonderful person I’ve ever known. She had always been a huge part of my life and now that she’s gone I realise that I’d always assumed she would be.

You never expect the sky to fall down, the sky is always there and always will be. And that’s exactly how I felt about my mother.

When my father phoned me early one morning to tell me my mother was dying the first words I said to him were “you’re joking”. Obviously he wouldn’t, but my instinct was that it couldn’t be happening. Him phoning me again later (I can’t remember if I’d left to drive home or was just about to leave) to tell me she had died just didn’t seem real – I was numb. I arrived home before my brother (who’d been staying with me that weekend and was driving himself to my dad’s) and stepped into the hall. My dad came over to me and something I didn’t expect then happened. All my life my dad had been the one to comfort me in times of sadness but this time he was the one holding onto me and I was the one comforting him. It’s times like that you realise when you’ve grown up and become an adult. We were both inconsolable and if you ever find yourself imagining what a situation like that is like, imagine it a million times worse. And then when my brother turned up, well think a British billion times worse (that’s a million million). Even then, I still just couldn’t believe it.

In the months after her death I just couldn’t grasp that she was gone. I’d walk past an arts and craft shop and my first thought would be to take her there the next time she was down. I’d see something on TV that I knew she’d be interested in and I’d go to pick up the phone and call her before reality hit me. It was as though my brain just wouldn’t accept that she was gone forever.

Whenever I’d visit my father’s house I’d come down in the morning before anyone else was up and watch TV in the lounge like I always did. I’d be sitting there waiting for her to come in and sit next to me like she always did (we were early risers). I cried far more while she was suffering with cancer than after she died but on mornings like that I could never hold back the tears, sat there sobbing on my own waiting for someone that was supposed to always be there who I started to realise never would be again.

After some time – I couldn’t tell you how much – my brain dealt with things in a different way. I seemed to accept that she was gone and didn’t find myself about to call her any more. Instead she kept turning up in my dreams. Sometimes the dreams would be set in my childhood and it was only when I woke up that I’d feel sad, knowing I’d seen her again, or feel happy because it felt like I’d spent some more fleeting moments with her. More upsetting were the dreams where I knew she was dead in the real world, and in the dream she did too and I was just talking to her telling her how I missed her. Waking up would just take me away from her. If I were a spiritual person I’d feel comforted that maybe she was reaching out to me from beyond the grave, but unfortunately I know better and it’s my mind coming to terms with her death showing me what it thinks I want to see – or something like that. Odder were the ones where in the dream I saw her and was really upset knowing that when I woke up she’d be gone. I’d wake up with tears on my pillow but had left the sadness in the dream and didn’t feel upset at all.

The dreams started to fade away (although they do come back from time to time) and I found that my mind seemed to understand that she was gone. It was as though in the preceding years (and it took that long) my brain had been drip-feeding me little bits at a time rather than trying to get my head around the concept that my mother was gone all at once. It’s a good job I didn’t take it all in at once – because it’s such an utterly terrible thing to have to get used to and live with. I feel so bad for friends who lose parents because I know that it actually never gets any easier with time – you have to carry the pain and burden for the rest of your life. The only thing that changes is that you learn to live with it in your own way.

As I said at the start, not a day goes by that I don’t miss her. I still get upset from time to time but my mother was exactly the same decades after the death of her mother. She never hid the tears from us and as a result we were brought up knowing that it was perfectly normal to miss someone you loved and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.

She wrote me a letter when she knew she wouldn’t make it and in it she told me she’s always admired my positive outlook on life and to make the most of life as it’s so precious. Every day that goes by that’s exactly what I try to do.

I’ve wanted a yucca plant for about 20 years but for some reason never got around to buying one. My mother used to drag my brother and I around garden centres when we were kids and I’d often imagine I was in a jungle exploring and hiding from tigers. I’d particularly like hiding behind the giant yuccas with their thick trunks and tropical looking leaves as they provided excellent cover from marauding predatory 200KG cats and younger brothers. Whenever I’d walk past a yucca in a garden centre, DIY store or supermarket, I’d make a mental note that I must get one one of these days.

Well, after two decades that day has finally come. I noticed a few of my colleagues had plants on their desks and that mine looked a little shabby by comparison (well a lot shabby really). Aside from the football trophies (there are 3) on my desk it was all paper, books and post-it notes. I thought a plant would brighten up the place no end and since I was coming up on having been at my current job for 2 years (which is about as long as I’ve ever been in the same job) I decided I’d finally get a plant – the first I’ve had at any desk I’ve ever sat at.

So a trip out to a garden centre in Gargrave (not far from where I live) and I was returned to my childhood surrounded by clumps of bamboo, various bushes and trees along with a hell of a lot of plants. Of course without my childhood wonder and imagination it was less a jungle and more a plain old garden centre. Luckily they had loads of yucca plants in various sizes so I bought the one pictured and am now doing my best to keep the thing alive! (I’m not particularly green-fingered so it’ll be a first). Luckily I hear they’re used to desert conditions so my forgetting to water it for weeks should work out nicely.

Like most people of my age I grew up with terrorism on my doorstep. “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland started long before I was born and while I won’t go into the history now it was something I never thought I’d see the end of.

Since my father was in the army at the time (the Territorial Army thankfully), he’d tell me about people he knew murdered at the hands of the IRA and I’d feel anger and fear. I’d hear about bombings, knee-cappings and the terrible things humans can do to other humans in the name of ideology. The hunger strikers in the Maze prison sacrificing their lives for what they believed in. British soldiers under such incredible stress that events like Bloody Sunday happened.

The problem was that both sides firmly believed they were in the right and nobody was ever going to back down. The hard line of the British Government back in the 80′s – who believed they were neutral in the conflict and were simply trying to maintain law and order in Northern Ireland and protect the people’s right to democratic self-determination – just served to bolster the IRA’s views. And likewise the actions of the IRA (and other republican movements) – who saw the British army as the enemy, colluding with the state forces and loyalist paramilitaries (it later turned out they were absolutely correct about the collusion) – such as the Brighton Bombing just polarised the British Government further.

The thing is, I could understand both points of view. If a foreign army was occupying my country, walking the streets of my town arresting people that I knew, beating them and intimidating my family I’m damn sure I’d stand up and fight them. But likewise, as a Briton we had to do something about the sectarian violence on people who considered themselves British – you couldn’t just turn a blind eye.

In short it was a horrible situation and I could never see peace because there was never going to be a solution that satisfied everybody. And it was clear that no amount of military might or firepower could quell a sustained guerrilla campaign of terrorism. The Russians couldn’t do it in Afghanistan and the British couldn’t do it in Northern Ireland.

And yet here we are, Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams (whose voice used to not be allowed on BBC TV so an actor had to do voice-overs if you can believe it) sitting side by side declaring peace. How did that happen?

Well it wasn’t by “bombing them back to the stone-age”, it wasn’t by sending in more troops. It was by bringing the troops home. By letting terrorists go free from prison. By politics and diplomacy. I can’t imagine how hard it must be for the families of the thousands of people who lost their lives over The Troubles seeing murderers walking the streets. But the reality is that if you want to have lasting peace this is a sacrifice that people have to make.

I can’t imagine the peace after the first and second world wars would have been easy to take for those who lost loved ones, but it was a price that had to be paid because the alternative is much worse. And that was the case here. It’s easy to look back in the history books, see when the second world war ended and imagine that someone flicked a switch and life went back to normal. What you don’t see written about is how people got over their bitterness (most didn’t, they just had to bury it and carry on with their lives). The difference for me and people of this time is we’ve lived through it and can see how hard it was and the tremendous loss of life. Generations from now when the Troubles are summarised in history books peace will have seemed inevitable and quick in coming and a picture like the one above will no doubt be in the chapter headed “Lasting Peace Declared” or something similar.

But we should never forget how hard peace is to come by, and how precious it is. It saddens me greatly to see the same mistakes being made by the Americans in Iraq. My definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome. I guess that’s the insanity of war.

I’ve never been on holiday to Ireland and it’s a place I’ve deliberately avoided on principle for many years. I think it’s about time I booked a trip over soon. And I never thought I’d say that.

I just got a new mobile phone and since I was switching from Nokia (interesting spelling suggestion right) to Motorola and I couldn’t get the import tool to import my list of contacts I had to painstakingly go through all my numbers one by one and copy them to their new home.

It was a strange and in many ways sad experience. I’ve known a lot of people over the last 10 years or so of mobile phone ownership. Quite a few I’m still in regular contact with but a surprising number of them I’ve not spoken to in over 2 years. A few even longer. And there were a couple who I couldn’t even remember at all.

It’s sad because if you’ve made it into my contacts list then it means you mattered to me when I added you. I only save the numbers of people I want to call again. To see the name of former close friends and wonder what they’re doing now means I didn’t keep in touch like I wanted to. To see the name of someone I can’t even remember feels like a failure. And no, before you suggest it I’m not going to call them!

You see time’s short and life’s short. You can’t keep in contact with everybody. Your life and their lives move on and you can only look back with fondness at the time you shared. There’s no sense looking back with regrets. But if it’s all the same I’m a sentimental old fool so I’ll keep all the numbers. Even if I never dial them again, at least they’re there as a memento of times past.