My dad used to say I was so tight I could peel an orange in my pocket. He particularly enjoyed telling people this when it was my round in the pub. There I’d be, perfectly happy with my blackcurrant and soda water, while he announced to everyone within earshot that his son was tighter than a duck’s arse. To be fair, he probably had a point. I’ve always liked having savings, hated owing people money and felt considerably more comfortable knowing there was something left in the

This is probably the one thing I have wanted to write about more than anything else, but every time I start, my overthinking brain eventually gets the better of me and I think, fuck this. It’s about food, although the more I’ve tried to write it, the more I’ve realised how much else comes with it. Complicated relationships with food have been somewhere in the background of my life for as long as I can remember. I just never recognised them as complicated. Food, weight and app

I think most of us look in the mirror and consider ourselves relatively normal. Why wouldn't we? We've spent our entire lives getting used to the person staring back at us, so naturally we assume they're a fairly reasonable example of what a human being should look like. There I am, 45 years old, looking back at myself with the quiet confidence of a man who still believes he could become a dot-com millionaire with one of his weird-arse business ideas. I'll get that promotion,

I think I have always been quite good at reacting to other people’s problems. That is not meant to sound impressive. It is probably just the way my brain works. Give me somebody else’s problem and I become useful very quickly. I can listen, ask questions, remember some tiny detail they mentioned three weeks ago and convince myself there must be something practical I can do to make whatever is happening slightly less shit. My own problems are different, although not because I

I've worked with all sorts of people over the years. Some have been loud, direct and capable of turning a fairly ordinary Tuesday morning meeting into something resembling a hostage negotiation. Others have been quieter and more considered. There have been people I've liked immediately, people I've taken a while to understand and probably a few who've taken their time to understand me. For the most part, I've always found a way of making it work. You learn what makes somebody

I started writing this on the 29th of September 2026, the anniversary of the day my dad died. I think about him a lot anyway, but around this time of year I find myself remembering things I haven’t thought about for ages. I’ve written about losing him before. Today, I’ve been thinking about what he was like when he was here, and how a man who spent years grounding me eventually became the person who kept me grounded. See what I did there. My dad had two rules when we were gro

Thirty-five years of friendship, terrible decisions and the quiet way men drift apart without ever really falling out. When I was about ten or eleven, me and my best mate went over to the school to play football. We did that all the time back then. There was no arranging anything, nobody checking a family calendar or sending a message asking if half four worked. You picked up a football, knocked at someone’s house and hoped they were in. When we got there, a few other lads we

I have come to the conclusion that I am a remarkably normal man. I'm forty-five. I have a job, a son who I adore, a car and an increasingly complicated relationship with my own hamstrings. I go to the gym, coach kids' football and spend a large proportion of my working life talking about sewage, so admittedly the definition of normal is already doing some fairly heavy lifting. I work in wastewater, which means I can spend an afternoon discussing sewage treatment with complete

This week I was offered a new job with the company I have worked for, for the last five years. When the announcement went out across the business, I laughed. Not because I don't want the job. I do. I'm genuinely looking forward to it. I laughed because somehow, at 45 years old, I have become an Operations Manager. That probably doesn't sound particularly remarkable until you consider that I left school with very little apart from a GCSE in Art, which I was naturally good at a

My mum phoned me last night to ask if my ears were burning. I didn't have a fucking clue what she was talking about, so naturally I said no. I'd accidentally posted one of my Wildly Gentle pieces onto Facebook as a Reel. I'm still getting the hang of putting my writing out there and, although I wasn't particularly bothered, I've generally kept most of it away from Facebook and the people who actually know me. I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe some of the things I write show a

The other day my mum sent me an old photograph of the three of us together — me, her and my little brother — on my grandad’s boat. I must have been about thirteen, and my brother was probably three. I was in the river swimming while he stood there wearing one of those little life jackets that made children look like they were being prepared for an emergency evacuation. Mum had one arm clamped around him because he was the youngest, the favourite and, as far as she was concern

Sixteen minutes into a football match this morning, we were 3–0 up and absolutely flying. I coach an under-11s team and, like pretty much every grassroots football team in the country, mine is made up of a complete mixture of kids. I have a few lads who are frighteningly good for ten years old, the sort who seem to know where a football is going to bounce before the rest of us have even realised it has been kicked. Then I have others who absolutely love football but aren't qu

For the last ten years, I have religiously taken my son swimming on a Thursday. Afterwards, I get him something to eat, he usually runs around the gym like a madman, and I have a pint or two. I love my Thursdays. We swim quite a lot anyway, but there has always been something slightly different about Thursday. It feels like the point in the week where everything starts to slow down a bit. Work is nearly done, the weekend is not far away, and for an hour or so we are just in t

I have been thinking a lot lately about loneliness and what it actually does to you, particularly as a man, because I think we are quite good at hiding it from everyone, including ourselves. The problem is that loneliness doesn't always look like somebody sitting at home with nobody to speak to. Sometimes it looks like somebody going to work every day, training, taking the kids to football, answering emails, laughing, making plans and generally getting on with life. You can b

I was talking to someone recently when, halfway through the conversation, they reached for their phone. Nothing had gone off. There was no message they were waiting for and no call coming through. They just picked it up, looked at it for a few seconds, put it back down and carried on talking. A minute or so later, they did exactly the same thing again. I don't think they even realised they were doing it, which is probably why it stuck with me. Not because I thought they were

Why Effective Leadership Might Be One of the Most Important Safety Controls We Have There is a phrase I have encountered countless times during my career in construction and health and safety: the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. It has likely been printed on more safety posters than anyone could count; however, this overuse can sometimes diminish its significance. Nonetheless, this phrase has always resonated with me. Not because I believe that good leaders

Men's mental health, overthinking and the risks we don't always see There is something slightly strange about the way we approach health and safety at work. We can spend hours discussing the condition of a scaffold, the suitability of a lifting accessory or whether somebody has selected the correct gloves, yet the condition of the person actually doing the work can receive considerably less attention. I don't mean whether they are trained, competent or physically capable of d