My friend Elizabeth, who has a long-established blog, Stories of Buttons and Bread, to which she contributes each weekend, has been trying to persuade me to start my own blog. I have always resisted, at the same time as I regularly check in to read her weekly pieces. They always make me think about the centrality of the small details of daily life that she so beautifully describes, the courage and value and beauty in simply being alive, putting one foot in front of the other, and getting on with this daily business of living. ‘No,’ I always remonstrate, ‘the regular writings in my notebooks over the years are personal, they are my way of making it possible for me to understand me and my ordinary journey.’ And that is quite true, except that they served another purpose in another time of my life.

Late last year I finally became a widow. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, but of course it was. Death always is when it finally comes about. My partner of more than fifty years, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when we were in our early thirties. The disease progressed very slowly, largely I believe because of his own determination to grab as much life as he possibly could for as long as he possibly could. I still think of him as ‘greedy for life’. They were hard years together, with dramatic ups and just as dramatic downs. But we were bonded together through shared values, a love of travel and adventure, and two children who really only ever knew their dad as a bloke with MS. My endless notebooks became the place where I explored my feelings about it all, and my feelings and ideas about the world around me. It was also a place where I could privately vent my despair, my fury at the problems we were always beset with, none of which I could ever discuss with him, in denial to the end. Denial, I must add, is a great survival mechanism, albeit very damaging to those around you when finally the obvious becomes impossible to deny.

But now, as the dust settles, and the awful last years of total and, for him degrading dependency slip further back into the long memories of our shared life, I realise that my writing was more than that, that in fact it was very much part of the continuum of our daily lives, it was part of the fodder for our constant conversation about the world outside us. And now those conversations, the place where you can say and explore anything safely, is no more. In truth, I had a good apprenticeship to its disappearance. Over the last few years, his fear of losing his independence and his focus on himself and his survival began to erode what we had taken for granted for so long. There was no room for the rest of us and our needs in his struggle for a physical life that was slipping inexorably from him.

Having gone through the obligatory funereal goodbye to a partner, a lover, a father, a colleague, a cobber, a teacher, an old soak and, in better days, a bon vivant, I now realise that these latter bad times have been put back in the place where they belong and it really is possible to see our fifty-something year journey together for what is was – a marvellous sharing of ideas and learning from each other, constant travels, great sex, a haphazard attempt to build a family, times of furious arguments, coping together with losing the idealism of youth … and underpinning it all a constant struggle to achieve a balance given our origins in the fiercely patriarchal society we grew up in.

But the conversations still continue in my head and the scribbles in my notebooks appear as usual. Maybe sharing them may be of use to someone, somewhere.