This isn’t a story. A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is a list of things that happened.

I found out about the Southport Stabbings on the day it happened, but I don’t remember where I was. I do remember finding out about the riots on the night of July 30th while sitting at my kitchen table. We were packing to go to Southport for a long-arranged visit to friends and family.

I didn’t feel anything while reading about it. Then my partner made a comment about something else, and I thought, I’ve had enough. I went and sat in a room by myself. I got angry about things my partner had said and the way they had said them. I got angry at work colleagues and people I hadn’t seen in quite a long time. After I’d done that for a while, I realized that I had quite a lot of emotion in me that needed a place to go, and it was coming out as anger. I think I might have cried. I don’t remember.

Southport is my hometown, really. I grew up very close, and it’s where I went to college. It’s where the vast majority of my childhood friends lived. Some of them lived on that street. I remember looking at the list of names when they were released and checking if I recognized any of the surnames.

We went up to Southport as planned. We were on edge. It was good to talk over what happened with old and close friends. The kids had a week of me telling them I loved them more than anything else while also snapping at them a lot more.

We went to the beach and walked in the woods; we had takeout and dinner, and sometimes we stopped to have a little cry and hold the kids really really tight.