I do have a review of The Smiffs gig on Saturday night, but I also have a huge pile of ironing. Needless to say, despite the shortened set (hope you’re better Paul), it was a great night.

For tonight only, the ironing wins…

When you write a story, you usually begin at the beginning and move forward. Where there is a beginning, you also believe there has to be an end. A resolution to what has come before and, therefore, a reason to start then keep going. The last few years of this life haven’t moved in straight lines, rather twisted and turned in the wind, the direction of which has been in someone elses gift.

It all fell apart on Thursday, 24th May 2007. Things weren’t great before that, but there was movement forward, with only the occasional detour. On that fateful Thursday, arriving home from work early to prepare for a formal dinner that evening, the post was collected from the mat and opened. Contained within was a form for a loan against the house. At first you assume it to be one of those random things you get sent, junk mail from desparate companies addressed to desperate people. But, there was too much information. The form was basically complete, with information that had to be given and couldn’t have been researched. It didn’t take long to work out why.

There had been a double life, one filled with prostitutes, affairs and lies. It all came out that night. That had to be it, because it couldn’t be worse. Some actions were, even to an untrained eye, illegal and had to be addressed.

The next week is a blur. It was The Boy’s third birthday the following Wednesday and what should have been a happy occasion saw us in hospital, with a social worker in tow, seeing the darling child being examined by a consultant. What couldn’t get any worse had. The surface was merely scratched. The betrayal was complete in ways you can’t believe possible of someone.

Fortunately, The Boy was superficially uninjured. Mental scars may follow, but physically no damage was done.

Despite being bailed at his first court hearing, two weeks later he was remanded in custody. The full horror of his activities began to come to light. The impossiblities of juggling social workers, the police, CEOP’s officers, a distraught child (whose father had disappeared overnight), work and family and friends who were so shocked some cried, others were physically sick, became the norm.

On the 22nd February 2008, he was convicted of 22 crimes and given an indeterminate life sentence. The shock waves reverberate around your world and the press begin hammering at the door, because the Judge believes its “in the public interest” to publish the address. You are as much a prisoner as he - afraid to leave the house and grappling to hold on to some form of reality as the world is splintered.

As time moves on, you try and get a life back together. You try to make plans. You try to celebrate lifes little victories. You do it not for yourself as much as for the people around you. The people who need to see progress being made. You do it for the small child, still bewildered at the loss of his father as well as coming to terms with the world around him, made so much harder by the disability he carries.

Then, you see a life-belt. A process that means that you can close one chapter and hopefully move onto the next. You grab hold of it and pin your hopes upon it. You have faith in a system and work within it, completing every step and mounting every hurdle. After completing reams of paper and opening your private life to others, there is a glimmer - a date where this starts to come to an end.

You don’t sleep for 10 days before. You live on a mixture of caffeine and nicotine. You work, you strive for normality for the child asleep in the small bed.

When finally the days comes, you stand outside an anonymous building, sick to your stomach. You prepare yourself to see the man you loved for the first time in nearly two-years, not knowing what to expect. You worry that you’ll break down in tears. You worry that, if you don’t, that will cause more damage than doing it. You worry about putting one foot in front of the other. And then..

And then nothing. You’ve adhered to the system. He hasn’t. The Judge makes an order that stretches the process an extra couple of months - nothing to him, a blink, a couple of rounds of golf and some evenings at the theatre - but a lifetime to you.

And so you sit, cigarette in hand, and begin to type. It isn’t the full story. It doesn’t have a real start and it certainly doesn’t have an end, but you carry on. The anger rises within for the first time and you smash your hand into the wall. It causes no-one pain but yourself, but it distracts you from the pain within. It’s not a solution, it’s probably not even a good idea. For today, though, it works.

Tomorrow you’ll smile again. You have to. If not, whats the point in it all? There will be an end, it will come and you have to keep that belief. The life-belt is still within reach and you stretch to grasp it before you sink.

And, like so much else, this remains to be continued.

My Saturday nights usually consist of watching crap television. With a child under five, this means Total Wipeout, which (in the BBC’s words, not mine) is a programme where “twenty contestants take on one of television’s largest and most extreme obstacle courses”. I spend the programme hiding behind the cushions on the sofa, imagining the horrific injuries being caused by the biggest balls on television (and that includes adult only channels), whilst The Boy rolls around laughing. I thought this was an under five thing, until my boss - a sensible man, despite his West Walian roots - recounted the latest episode, with tears of laughter forming in his eyes. It’s a bloke thing, obviously.

Anyway, this Saturday night will not concentrate on keeping The Boy awake long enough so that he’ll consider 6.30 Sunday morning as an inappropriate time to bounce on my bed. Instead it will be all about getting ready to enter the sweat-pit, also known as The Sub Club, and dance like a lunatic to the best music ever written.

The Smiths divide people. They are the Marmite of the music world. No-one “quite likes” The Smiths. There are fans and then there are the rest. People who can’t see the poetry of the lyrics. People who don’t see the uplifting quality of the music. People like My Dear Friend, who I’m sure will be adding his comments below at the first opportunity…

I remember listening to The Smiths on John Peel, with a transistor radio stuffed below my pillow in a pastel bedroom in the mid-1980’s. I was hooked instantly and like Peel himself, could see the humour in Morrisseys words. They weren’t depressing, as my friends then - and since - thought. To me, Coldplay are depressing (well, the early albums anyway). Radiohead had their moments too. But, The Smiths, they were a band that could see me through. Best of all - back then - my parents hated Morrissey’s voice with a passion and that was enough for me.

I tried to get The Boy into The Smiths whilst he was still embryonic, placing headphones on my bump and playing tracks to him. When he arrived early, I joked that he wanted to arrive in time to watch Morrissey at Glastonbury. He did. It was on the TV and he was more interested in being fed (and to be fair, basically unable to focus), but he was listening. I asked him the other day whether he liked Morrissey’s music. He asked if he was the one who did the advert music for Morrissons. I despaired. Then, last night in the car, Morrissey Threw “his” Arms Around Paris and The Boy, without prompting, pronounced that it was good. The clouds lifted, the rain cleared and we basked in the glow of a new morn. Well, not quite, but it was a moment to remember.

I have some original Smiths vinyl sitting in my loft. I also have a record player (remember them - the pure pleasure of putting on an album and placing the needle, carefully, and listening to the clicks and background noise as it moved towards the first track - ah!). However, of late, I have been listening to my music on computer and whilst I’ll happily re-order other albums in playlist, dropping tracks that I never quite “got”, The Smiths are still played in their original form. My brain rejects any new formations - and I’ve even had issues with some of the recent compilation albums, expecting track a, whilst track b appears.

Anyway, I digress. Saturday is about me, The Smiffs and rather more vodka than would be recommended by the Chief Medical Officer. It will come at the end of a week where I:

* briefed - and then re-briefed - politicians in Wales so new to their roles that they had trouble getting to grips with the basics of health policy.

* spent a day in London trying to persuade people that Wales was important - and its views as relevant as those of the rest of the UK.

* watched a debate that I had influenced and felt, despite the final vote, that I had got a few people to understand the points I was trying to make.

* tried to make sense of policy in Wales on research and development, which is different to the UK and not in a positive way.

* had to face my ex- for the first time in nearly two-years (well, that’s later today and he might not turn up, but it’s not the point and I haven’t slept properly for 10 days).

So, if the vodka flows, if the dancing is wild and if the singing is off-key, I think I deserve some latitude. It’s been a tough week already - and who knows how I’ll feel by tonight.

My ex- didn’t like The Smiths. Perhaps I should have realised back then, but what difference would it have made? None.