Understanding My Relationship with Money 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 comfortab

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

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

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