Hello. It’s been a while. The longest while, in fact, that I’ve gone without writing in over five years.

Things have taken the place of my writing time, my thinking time, my reporting time.

Well, one thing. A son.

I’m a daddy.

“You should write about that”, said my wife. Endlessly patient wife.

It’s been a busy few years. We moved into our new home three weeks before baby arrived. Enough time to move in, rescue furniture and countless storage boxes from parents’ attics and spare bedrooms, buy a bed, and paint a bedroom.

Not enough time to do anything more significant. Like fixing the roof, say. The best way to describe the roof’s current condition is to say that I found another hole in it recently. And now it’s fixed. And the list grows longer with the passing days as we discover more of what one might call the house’s inherent character.

But we don’t care. The years of uncertainty are over. We have reached an end to our time of Hiberno-renting, that mad deal where government after Irish government presides over a situation where a renter’s home can be pulled from under them in a flash. Then governments wonder why their subjects have such an apparently mad obsession with owning property. And they wonder about property crises. And getting property values up just another little bit.

I digress. The point is that we are off that Saturday morning treadmill. 2016 has been a funny old year in world terms but in McGeady Towers it has been a belter. A new home and a new baby. And two jobs. Two? I have another life, you see.

I am not a full time journalist. Never have been, although it has sometimes seemed like it. The pay in journalism not being what it might be, I still maintain another way of paying bills. Another benefit too. In the cold world of seeking mortgage approval the F-word (freelance) is not a good thing to have attached to oneself. Nor the S-word (self-employed). Not when all you are to a mortgage application assessor is a name on a piece of paper. So for the three long years of searching for a house I had the ability to list a job that wasn’t “freelance journalist” on a mortgage application. Good times.

Back to my new son. A subject of endless fascination and joy, but this typing idiot won’t be able to write about fatherhood in a way that hasn’t been put into words before. And better. I thought of describing the shared experience of childbirth; that’s “shared” in the loosest sense, of course, as if Tony Blair said he “shared” the experience of the Iraq war. And then I told myself to shut up and keep writing. It’s been long enough.

I’d learned things during the pregnancy. And before the pregnancy. The difficulty in getting pregnant in the first place, for one thing. And then staying pregnant. Our nation warns her young people that without birth control they’ll end up with child in less time than it takes to cast a vote on X-Factor. Then we get to another stage of life and discover it’s not that simple. Not that simple at all.

As with many other couples in their thirties it took us a long time to get past the first lap of pregnancy. False starts. Early hurdles clipped, bringing us to ground with a crash. Physical and mental pain to overcome before starting again. And we were the lucky ones. So many friends have needed IVF. Not one round of it either. Several, with each coming with their own package of hope, expense and heartbreak until – if lucky – they are blessed with new life. As this country has, in effect, privatised abortion to an offshore provider called Britain so too has it privatised access to pregnancy for those who have trouble doing so naturally.

At five a.m. on the day itself my wife’s little passenger signalled we should proceed to the hospital. We arrived a very short time later. Possibly too short a time. Five a.m. is Dublin’s empty hour. Too early for most to be on the roads heading to work, while the taxis ferrying last night’s partygoers to their beds are all done. Combine a wife undergoing contractions in the passenger seat with a city of empty roads and green lights and you sense a rare opportunity to put the foot down. Nothing stupid, your honour. All safe and no risks taken. But there are times where it’s better for a partner in pain to see somebody displaying visible urgency as well as calm. Giving birth at the side of an empty city street is in nobody’s birth plan.

I think back to the moment the little man arrived. White and blue and screams before a beautiful silence as he lay on mummy’s chest, raising his head to look at us each in turn with those piercing, sparkling eyes. Curious eyes and a strong neck. Just minutes old. And tears from me. Not sobs. Nothing audible. Just tears of wonder and smiles. A tremendous, overwhelming happiness. Pride in my wife who’d put herself through something extraordinary for our family. Extending our family beyond two, giving both sets of parents their first grandchild.

I’d arranged to take a few weeks off from the other side of my earning existence. A decent stretch of weather, we three got out and about. Good for mummy’s recovery and valuable bonding time for daddy to have his son strapped to his chest, wandering around the place. Going back to a job was one of the harder things I’ve ever done. My time at home with family was the three best weeks of my life, and it’s not close.

The work I do in service of bill-paying is about as far from journalism as you can get: Demand & Portfolio Management. I’m a lucky man. The people I work with are very smart. And, importantly, very nice. I’m good at particular aspects of the work, aspects that occupy a completely different place in my brain to every other part of my life.

But occupy space they do. And rightly so.

In summer 2016 I discovered that the addition of the little man resulted in a far greater impact on my brainspace, the scale of which I, very truly, did not foresee.

My evenings were now gone. My weekend mornings too. If you combine lunchtimes and borrowed half hours here and there, there’s really only enough time to write.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love writing. The act of putting words together to make an idea jump off the page, or simply to ensure that a sentence says something in just the right way, gives me much pleasure. And of the journalism process, writing is the quick bit. Quickest by far. This is the thing that, perhaps, some might not understand.

Lost are the hours of fact absorption. The time to read. To think, both actively and idly. The calls to people who know things – get more detail; offer another perspective. And, if you’re lucky, a quote or two on the record to add a bit of flavour. Which means note-taking. And transcription, the journalist’s penance. And then the time and brainspace to plug pieces together. Again, consciously and subconsciously. Note that this is my method of writing only. In general, it suits my purpose. If I were filing copy on final whistle, I would have a different purpose.

And being a human capable of acts of self-delusion on a truly grand scale I was probably the only one who didn’t see this coming. It’s a bit of a sharpener.

Through my career editors here in Ireland (hat tips to Tony Leen, Malachy Logan, Noel O’Reilly, Colm O’Connor, Paul Mallon, Adrian Russell, Donny Mahoney) somehow looked kindly on a man with a blog, without formal journalism certification but with a keen respect for the profession, and some sort of strange determination to use numbers in sport.

People in other places helped too. “You’re over here just hustling? That’s awesome.” said an american editor who I met in Boston a few years back. And hustling I was, using leave I’d built up from one job to forge a path in something new. Leave spent working, and on the road, all made possible by the support of my wonderful wife and, it must be said, the great understanding of people from that other job who knew that I had a significant sideline interest.

I pitched and pitched. Said yes a lot, piling deadlines atop deadlines. Stretches where the hours of sleep I got were stupidly little. But I did it and made it happen. Writing was a way of turning something about which I was deeply passionate into something real.

My son has moved into his own room, and has an actual bedtime. And I look at my writing desk. It is never tidy. But it is always active. As it is, there are recordings untranscribed; notes untyped. There has been a stillness about it that is distinctly odd.

But this is ok. I have been on pause. This might be my only go at living those precious early weeks of fatherhood. It’s just the way it had to be.

Of anything available in the world, that little man has needed two things from me – love and a roof. The first is boundless, the second I will work to maintain.

But a writer needs to write.

So here I am at the keyboard, firing out sentences. Then paragraphs. Then shuffling all about so they fit together a little better. Then again so they fit better still.

Exercising the writing muscle.

I’ve been doing some radio work. Some conference work – interviewing, moderating, facilitating. And asking questions of smart people.

Laps of the track.

The routine will settle and I’ll get some brainspace back. I can’t put a date on it right now. But I’m looking forward to it.

See you soon.