When do you become 'responsible'?

Mrs TM and I are just back from a thoroughly enjoyable weekend seeing the kids. We stayed in The Marriott Hotel by Manchester Airport (courtesy of Tesco vouchers!) and very nice it was too. I even ventured into the swimming pool and managed about 100m of front crawl in between playing around on the floats, boiling in the sauna and chilling out in the jacuzzi. It was great to see the kids; they are all looking well and the youngest 2 seem to have grown noticeably in the 3 weeks since they started back at school. Keeping up with teenagers, though, is very hard. Our second son didn't stay with us on Friday night because he had to be up early to go and play rugby in Hull on Saturday (they won 41-0). We picked him up as we dropped our eldest son off; he was off to a social evening with his friends on Saturday although we did all meet up again on Sunday morning.

Getting back to the title of this post, when do we become responsible? Is it when we leave home? Get a job? Get married? Have kids? Well I've done all of those things so I suppose I must be responsible, but is owning a house the ultimate expression of being responsible? We decided, almost on the spur of the moment, that now was the right time for us to get on the property ladder. We made a list of things we wanted in a property and started browsing the internet and drew up a shortlist of properties we wanted to view. To cut a long story short we have seen a property that fits almost all of our requirements. In fact it far exceeds what we were expecting to buy and it will stretch us financially in the short term. But it is a lovely place; the building itself is some 250 years old and so benefits from oak beams and 16 inch stone walls. It also has a cellar that Mrs TM has already agreed would become a proper turbo dungeon! However, I'm getting ahead of myself. We need to ensure the finances are in place and go through the legal motions to make it all happen. Fingers crossed!

What this house purchase business will mean is that any 2011 cycling plans I may have had have gone out of the window. The revised plan will include a bunch of sportives as and when I can get them in and hopefully The Outlaw triathlon as parto f a relay team. And that will be about it. New bling and overseas trips will be sacrificed on the property altar, but hopefully 2012 will be better in this respect. We will just have to wait and see.

Looking ahead in the shorter term, I fly out to Barcelona on Thursday for the Challenge Barcelona triathlon. If I'm honest with myself I could have really done with this race 2 weeks ago as I felt lean and sharp then. The last 2 weeks have seen my training programme become sporadic and nutritionally I have not been as disciplined as I perhaps should have been. I will, though, enjoy the event and hopefully the fitness I have gained throughout the year will not have deserted me in the last 2 weeks and I can record another 112 mile PB (as I have on each of the last 3 occasions I have tackled this distance). Whatever happens, it promises to be a very enjoyable weekend.

All the best