(Note - Remember that I dictate these blogs, and Millie puts them together for me).
Stay with me, Colin. It's a bit out of left field, this one; try and get to the end because you'll appreciate it later….
This blog is about childhood lost; it's about that moment when a 53-year-old's heart breaks because somebody says something else, and you wonder where it all went.
It's about The Ladybird, the book of The Mid-life Crisis, where the guy is walking around B&Q and sees a tin of boat polish only to realise that he will never own a boat (Having never wanted to own a boat before he saw the polish!).
And so, I stopped what I was doing, which was stretches and press-ups to write this, or at least to speak it, because I wanted to capture it, or else I would've lost it.
The big news in my life at the moment, or one of the pieces of big news because there are several, is that we bought a new house (without you selling our old house). It's a very Colin and Alison thing to do.
We bought the new house because it was as close to perfect as we could get for the house that we wanted, although it's far from perfect and will be 10 years' worth of work to get it anywhere close to where we really want it to be.
I've digressed, as often happens in these little musings and blogs.
And so in between trying to leave all the furniture in my old house so that I can try and sell it and going to my new house, which has no furniture and trying to be at it, we found ourselves moving a few things across in our horse lorry (long story) at around about 9 p.m. on a Saturday.
Alison loves to set these challenges for me, trying to see whether she can break my patience, which inevitably she can't, at least not very much, but we headed over to the new house in the middle of nowhere really, and my son Callum was there with his friend Josh because they had been there for a while because Josh wanted to 'frolic in the fields' at Callum's new house.
And so, we got there at 9 o'clock, and the boys were there because Josh has just passed his driving test, so they have this 17-year-old freedom where they have the entire world at their behest and can go and do anything they want.
It's the start of their Easter holidays in year 12, so time is almost limitless, and every day lasts an eternity.
But as we were finishing up at the house and because we had a house viewing the following morning, I said to Callum, "Why don't you just stay at Josh's tonight and then I don't have to get you out of your bed early to tidy the house and show someone around."
And so they were just talking about what they would do when they woke up tomorrow morning, and they were just finding ways to waste their time in the most interesting or satisfying way they could.
I think they settled on playing a 20-game FIFA tournament on the Xbox while lying in their beds listening to something like Fontaines D.C., and my heart broke, and I wondered where it all went and where did my life go that I had never had any time in my life to do anything like that?
And then I realised that I've been thinking for the past little while that 17 years ago, I was 36 (I paid my mortgage off at 36), but my boss had sold the practices, and I'd thrown everything away and gone to move to somewhere else but 17 years from now, I'll be 70 and pretty much I'll be on the wind down if I'm still alive.
And so everything that comes next in the next 17 years, if I'm given the chance, is everything I've got, isn't it?
It's not about what happened before; it's about what happens now and about what happens then. It's about what I can do or be or how I can spend the time in the best way possible and live 'the best life' for the next 17 years.
Although I've got this aim to work to 85, I absolutely want to do that; I'm also aware of the fact that I might never make it anywhere near there, and so all of these things seem to swirl around in a minute as I watched Josh and Callum decide how to waste their time tomorrow morning.
One of the things that I'm not doing enough of is listening to bands like Fontaines D.C. (If you don't know them, think punk rock pogues).
But as I, just before I was dictating this little spiel today, I was listening to Dublin City Sky by Fontaines D.C., and that's probably what absolutely catapulted me back to 1989 when I was 17 trying to find things to waste my time with on a Sunday morning with one of my best mates.
I went to dental school when I was 17, and everything changed.
It's been an extraordinary journey, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't take these times on a Sunday morning to stop and think and just to make sure that I'm not going off track and doing the things which are most deeply meaningful to me, and not just getting dragged in directions for other people's entertainment.
Blog Post Number - 4132