I nearly deleted this website for good. It probably would have made more sense. I don’t have time to keep a website. I ought to be putting my website subscription fees into a savings account for my child. I should be focusing on being a better parent.

And yet, here I am. My ego has won, even though the act of publishing anything under my own name fills me with fear and a large part of me hopes that no one will notice, let alone read it.

A colleague of mine wrote a lengthy article a few weeks back considering the value and purpose of writing, the importance of having an audience, and whether it’s worth bothering with if no one is paying attention. My own view is rather more straightforward. I cannot not write. Whether anyone reads what I write is not my concern.

At the start of the year, I logged onto my website portal to see how long it had been since I last published anything. I was horrified by what I found. Convinced that it must be a mistake (five months without authoring a single new post???) I spent half an hour wading through folders on my computer in search of the missing entries that must somehow have been deleted from my site.

No such entries existed. Or rather, they existed only in my head – a series of unpublished musings that occupied my attention for a time, but never made it onto the page. And that was four months ago. An entire pregnancy of inactivity.

It’s a vicious cycle. Writing, like music, football and film, helps to keep me balanced. When events overtake me and I go without these essential pursuits, I become increasingly deranged, and unfortunately, this derangement makes me ever less inclined to sit at the computer and commit my thoughts to writing. Nine months down the line, you are basically reading the words of a madman.

All I can do is apologise, to you and to myself. I’ll try not to let it happen again.