I wondered whether the death of my dad would be a good time to stop writing in this journal. (I really hate the word ‘blog’ and will henceforth never use it). ‘Journal’ is much better.

Anyway, I got back from New Zealand and went back to work and normal life, and had a few chats with people about losing parents, and then kind of sat with it. Sat on it maybe. I had one excellent dream where dad came to me and told me he was ok and that I needed to tell mum he was ok, and it seemed very real until he became a reality tv contestant and then things turned weird. But I took the sentiment that dad was in fact ok and relayed it back to the family.

There’s a huge amount of photos I took of dad, my mum and my brothers and sister and sister-in-law over his last week and they just kind of exist on my camera roll and I know them by the yellowish colour that unites the series, and I skip past them because I am not ready (maybe never ready) to look at them properly. But I also want to see the skin on his arms again, and his hair, and his jumpers and his teeth and his lovely blue eyes and so those photos will just stay there sandwiched between work photos taken in Edinburgh and a million selfies of me in bikinis trying to look skinny. Dad and normal life. Dying and normal life.

And then my phone throws up those terribly smug vignettes and there’s my dad again, in a hat or pushing one of my kids in a stroller or smiling with mum or with the cat, being a bit lost at a train station or taking his teeth out, and I am sucker-punched. Because where’s that guy, then? He used to like hearing my news when I called them – but I don’t have him to tell anymore. Which then makes you wonder where all those stories that I told them have gone. Where do his stories go? I mean, he became fonder and fonder of telling the same three stories as he got older – usually with a horse in them – so I think there are probably hundreds of people who could recite those ones off my heart – but I wonder about the smaller in-between stories. Gone, I guess. We can’t be relied upon to remember them, or work out which ones mattered. All of them? None now.

So someone asked me last week if I had processed dad’s dying. I said no. That maybe you don’t. I am not sure I want to. It’s ok his hovering, it’s ok he is on my camera-roll, it’s ok he visits me in my dreams on the way to becoming a core cast member at the Big Brother house. I don’t mind those sudden rushes of shock when I remember he isn’t there anymore, or those slower shifts of dull ache when you know your dad has died and you simply miss him. I am glad I knew him and was fathered properly, in that way that you just know a therapist would say was good and right.

Anyway, that’s how things feel three months on. And while I thought, yes, let’s no longer write in this journal because argh I am too busy and who cares anyway, here I am again.

What of that? I am now about six months into taking Wegovy so I am skinner than I used to be (which explains the constant bikini shots) and I am one month in to taking a nightly drug for hair loss as my hair is thin anyway and babies stripped me of my keratin and my hair seems to shed every time I wash it (leading to imaginative hair clump artistry on the shower walls and quite a lot of it down the drain which gets clogged and is like a thing from the bowels of satan when I pull it up) and so I am now trying to fix it. I am also on HRT which perhaps makes me less cranky but really who knows and I am also on something for low thyroid and I also got micro needled on the weekend and now I have a peeling face. Who even is this overly medicated and fiddled-with lady, I hear you ask? She is a tired mother of six who is nearly 49, is who. And her kids tower above her and they are funny and she cannot keep up with whatever colloquial nonsense they come out with, though she tries.

Parenting wins are limited to the small things, like when I know all the words to Zombie or can give a thorough precis of the YBAs or when I introduce the children to a movie from my teenage years that they like. Honorable mention goes to August’s A-level and GCSE results for my two middle kids who did super well, and to the biggest who is applying to Oxford for his MA (oh how my small North Island younger self wants to scream and hyperventilate at the thought of that) and my second eldest has a sensible and strategic job and the third is on a working gap year capped off with a Camp America stint and the other two are growing nicely and becoming interesting and funny too. So I am very very very pleased with how that thick wedge of my life turned out – thank you, delicious sons.

Turkey this year was a riot of boat trips and rock jumping and menemen (iykyk) and heat rash and SPF 50 and five books read in the sun (The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner, The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller, Maestra by L S Hilton, Luster by Raven Leilani, and Poor Things by Alasdair Gray – all quite full of infidelity and women on the edge of something quite big and nuts). I was already brown because my buddies Ash and Sian took me to France after I got back from New Zealand for a week to recover a little, and then we – like greedy little travelling piggies – took off a few months later for two weeks in Kayakoy. Here are some photos:

And when I haven’t been a glamorous travelling-type, I got a tattoo, we got three commercials shot in the house which paid for half of Turkey though meant a week of utter, utter dysfunction and chaos and no sleep for anyone, I bought a see through dress from Zara, I won a Cece jewellery gold enamelled pendant which got lost in the mail for like a year but is now safely and securely added to neck mess situation:

And to finish, a little more of dad for you: