Where did the days go?

Sorting through an old box of magazines brings back some fond memories of a bygone age - just a few years ago

In the full throes of parenting … back in 2009.

“Where’s the brake?” an old friend asked me recently when I told him my eldest daughter was about to turn 22. Many people I meet have only just read Running with the Kenyans, and so they imagine my children are still toddlers running around under my legs. They get a shock when I say two of them are at university.

The last few weeks I’ve been going through an old box of Green Parent magazines that I’ve been hoarding. For 10 years I wrote a column for the magazine called Modern Dad, in which, in the words of the editor when she commissioned me, I was to be the “green parent version of Tim Dowling”. Mr Dowling writes a column for the Guardian about whatever happens to be going on in his life that week. It’s a funny, light-hearted but also wistful look at one man’s existence.

So for years I wrote amusing anecdotes about washed-out camping trips, hospital visits, or our weekly Monday night “Volcano Cafe”, where my children would pretend to be rich guests at a restaurant, and I would be their French waiter. The column spanned our trips to Kenya and Japan, and reading them back it’s like a diary of my time as a father of three small children (the very first one starts with the birth of my youngest).