Ten Years

“And then one day you find ten years have got behind you

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun”

Pink Floyd, Time

Time has always fascinated me, and this song has always resonated.

Ten years ago, our daughter was about to be diagnosed with leukaemia. Next week, she leaves home to go to university to study medicine.

I am also now ten years older than my father was when he died. That gives me pause for thought and has probably shaped more of who I am today than I realise.

Professionally, though, I certainly didn’t miss Pink Floyd’s starting gun. For most of my adult life, work occupied a huge amount of space. I worked hard, built a career I was proud of and spent a lot of time focused on the next objective, the next opportunity and, inevitably, making money. If anything, perhaps I became so caught up in the race that I didn’t always notice what I was passing along the way. To borrow from The Verve, had I become “a slave to the money, then you die”?

That is probably too harsh. I enjoyed my career and I’m proud of what I achieved. But the question of whether I had given too much time to work was beginning to matter.

Treatment created its own measurement of time: hospital visits, good days and bad ones, milestones reached and the next one appearing on the horizon. There were periods when life became much smaller, and we stopped thinking particularly far ahead. The future would arrive when it arrived. For the moment, we concentrated on what was immediately in front of us.

One child was going through treatment, but the whole family was living with it.

Looking back now, I think the possibility of losing a daughter made me want to be closer to all three. Not literally, and certainly not forever, but it made the time we had with them feel different.

My eldest daughter had grown up largely in a different household after her mum and I divorced. She experienced a different version of me from the one her younger sisters have known, and there were ordinary parts of her childhood that I wasn’t there for. I cannot go back and change that. What became more uncomfortable was realising that, with my younger two, I was there and yet I was still missing things. Not because of divorce or circumstances beyond my control, but because of choices I was making about work.

When treatment eventually finished, we went on holiday to Cyprus. For the first time in a long while, there was a sense that we had come through something, and I began to wonder what I wanted the next part of life to look like. Not in some dramatic moment of revelation, but more like a question that had started to become difficult to ignore: was I spending my time in the right places?

I had a wife and three daughters I loved, yet work could quite easily consume whatever time and attention I was prepared to give it. And work is very good at taking whatever you offer.

Then Covid arrived. Like everyone else, our world became smaller again, but this time something unexpected happened. I was suddenly spending much more time at home. I was still working, often very hard, but I was there, and we began to experience a version of family life that my working routine had rarely allowed. Being there for dinner. The small conversations that happen almost by accident. Simply being around.

None of it sounds particularly significant when you write it down, which is perhaps precisely why it matters. You cannot predict when your children might want to talk to you. Sometimes the only way to be there for those moments is simply to be there more often.

For years, I thought being a good father meant working hard, providing and creating security, both emotional and financial. I still believe those things matter, but I began to see more clearly that our role as parents involved something much less measurable too: presence. Increasingly, I wondered whether I might reach the end of my working life having achieved plenty professionally but having been less present for the people who mattered most to me. I wanted a better relationship with my daughters and with my wife. Perhaps, more than anything, I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose myself in work before I had worked out who I was without it.

The thoughts that had started in Cyprus grew louder during Covid, and, eventually, I retired.

Perhaps what I was really trying to do was win back some time. Not stop it, because I’m old enough to know that isn’t possible, but capture a little more of it while I still could.

By then, my eldest daughter had already gone away to university. Her move gave us more freedom to think about moving too and eventually helped make St Andrews possible. Whilst I can’t recreate the everyday relationship I missed with her while she was growing up, I hope she has experienced a better version of me as an adult: a father with more time and a greater willingness to be available when she needs me.

Not perfect. Just better.

My two younger daughters were still at home when we moved to St Andrews, and that gave me something I had been trying to reclaim. For that first year, I walked my youngest daughter to school in the morning and walked home with her again in the afternoon. Two walks every day. We talked about whatever was going on in her world or, quite often, nothing very much at all. I loved those walks.

For most of my working life, that sort of time would have been squeezed between everything else. There would have been a train to catch, a meeting to get to or something supposedly more important waiting for me. Now the walks were the important thing. Eventually, of course, walking to and from school with your dad became deeply uncool and that particular period ended, but I had been there for it.

That was what I was trying to reclaim. Not just the big moments, but the ordinary ones. Being around when they got home. Making dinner. Having time to listen.

Our daughters may never fully appreciate why we made some of the choices we did. They don’t need to. Parenthood isn’t a transaction. We can only try to do what we think is right, and our role as parents is not to keep our daughters close to us. In many ways, it is exactly the opposite. Our job is to prepare them to leave.

We can’t make them want to spend time with us once they have built lives of their own, and we wouldn’t want those lives to revolve around ours. We want them to become independent, make their own decisions and work out who they are. But we hope they come back. Not necessarily back home, but back to us. We hope they want to talk, use us as sounding boards and know they can ask for help when they need it.

Perhaps that is what being available really means. Not making yourself indispensable, but trying to build the sort of relationship that is still there when you are no longer needed in the same way.

And now our daughter is leaving. There is a loss in that, although I’m conscious that the loss is ours, not hers. My wife, our youngest daughter and I will miss having her in the house. We will miss the noise, the conversations and the ordinary presence of another person whose routines have been woven into ours for years. The house will be different because she isn’t in it every day.

But that is our experience of her leaving. For her, this is a beginning.

I am a member of The New Club in St Andrews, and its motto seems particularly relevant here. Sempre Nova: always new. Keep moving forward, keep learning, keep becoming. And that is exactly what she is doing. University is not an ending for her. It is another beginning. She is leaving home, studying medicine, meeting new people, making her own decisions and discovering the next version of herself.

Ten years ago, sitting beside her in hospital, we would have given almost anything simply to know that she had this future ahead of her. Now that future has arrived, and part of loving her is letting her go and live it.

Increasingly, I have the feeling that time is accelerating. Of course it isn’t, but it feels that way. So much of life is spent looking forward: to easier times, to holidays, to retirement, to whatever comes next. Then, every so often, you reach one of those points and turn around. That is what I’m doing now.

My father’s death taught me that time could run out. Our daughter’s illness reminded us that the future was never guaranteed. Covid showed me something different again: time does not only get taken from us, sometimes we give it away.

For a large part of my life, I thought a lot about how I used my time productively. Now I think much more about where I spend it. Writing, golf, walking, reading, travelling, making dinner, sitting around a table with my family, having conversations that go nowhere in particular. None of these things necessarily look very productive when measured by the standards I spent much of my working life using, but increasingly I’m not sure productivity is the right measure.

The uncomfortable part of realising that ten years have passed so quickly is knowing that the next ten will too. I don’t find that depressing, but I do find it clarifying. Next week another version of our family life will end, and a new one will begin.

We will miss her, but this is her future now.

Sempre Nova.