Tell you what, 2018 has been a bad year for anyone who loves their kids. Twenty years from now, as they sit around a burning barrel in the irradiated bunker they call home, I guarantee that your children will ask you about Brexit. And they’ll ask you about climate change, and they’ll ask you about the nuclear war that’s bound to happen sometime in the next 18 months, and then they’ll ask what caused them. And we’ll have have to say: "Oh, funny story: we did," and they’ll get up and walk out and leave us to die from the wound we get fighting strangers for food in the gutter.

Watching all the various crises blossom around the world this year has been a stark reminder – at least to me – that we’re shaping a terrible place for our children to grow up. On a macro level, we’re all doing very badly.

In 2017, I was drowning

But speaking personally, 2018 couldn’t help but be an improvement on what came before. In 2017 I was drowning. Within the space of about six weeks, my mum died and my youngest son was born, and the sheer density of life and death knocked me completely off centre. I was lost and listless, and there were plenty of times when I just wanted to give up.

So if 2017 was the year where I fell apart, 2018 was the year when I started to put myself back together again. This year I got to take properly stock of where I am, both as a parent and a child. Tentatively, both are on the up.

For the former, I finally learned to drive. Having a car has already had a profound effect on my family; it means we can see new things and visit people without having to first load up a buggy with three weeks of provisions like the world’s hoardiest sherpas. It means I now have to follow more rules than I’ve ever had to follow as an adult. And, well, it means my oldest son swears like a navvy now.

“DICKFACE!” he yelled from the back seat just last week.

“What?” I replied. “What did you just say?”

“DICKFACE!” he called back. “DICKFACE! DICKFACE! DICKFACE! You DICKHEAD!”

“Who taught you that word?” I asked, fanning my cheeks with my hand at the scandal of it all.

I needn’t have asked. I taught him. I’m a quick-twitch swearer, and the pressure of carting the world’s most precious cargo around in a ridiculous speeding bomb means that he must have heard me call other drivers – and my car, and myself – a dickface hundreds of times already. I’m not proud of how quickly I’ve corrupted him. However, it is extremely funny, so there’s that.

Before mum died, she was forever losing her iPaid cable

The thing I’m proudest of, however, is something I did for a parent. In May I took part in a 65-mile walk around the Isle of Wight in memory of my mum. There was the sheer physical grunt of the walk, obviously, and all the money that I raised for charity. But it also helped me let go in a way I wasn’t expecting.

Before mum died, the cancer spread to her spine and paralysed her from the waist down, confining her to a hospital bed installed in my parents’ dining room. She was forever losing her iPad cable in this bed, so I bought her a packet of adhesive rubber cable holders to try and help her out a little.

On the night she died, I sat around her bed with my dad and my brother, thumbing one of these holders out of nervous energy. When she died, I slipped it into my pocket and kept it there for months. It stayed with me no matter. Having it with me felt like a tiny ritual, a way to keep a part of her with me.

The walk took place 10 months after she died. One thing they don’t tell you about walking for 27 hours straight is that, if you’re dumb enough to keep keys in your pocket, the motion from all those strides will eventually cause them to chafe against your thigh and become a cut. What’s more, the keys will also cut through the lining of whatever trousers you’re wearing and their contents will slowly spill out down your trouser leg.

That’s what happened during the walk. My keys scraped a hole in my pocket and, as well as losing about three quid in loose change, I also lost the cable holder; the object I’d been clinging to through the worst of my grief. I don’t know when it fell out, and for all I know it’s still there, laying unnoticed on the floor of a forest on the Isle of Wight somewhere.

At first, when I realised it had gone, I was distraught. But then I noticed the symmetry of it. I lost the thing I kept to remember my mum while taking part in a walk to remember my mum.

It was tiny thing, a meaningless thing, but I got the message. It’s time to move on now.