I THINK IT MAY BE SOMETHING to do with my age, but I drifted asleep some time around ten last night. There's been so much to do at work recently that I haven't been able to stop. So off I went, like a light, at the first opportunity. I slept solidly until just after six this morning, when my eyelids popped open and wouldn't stay shut. I lay prone on the sofa where I had fallen asleep, and watched the sun rise.

I saw the horizon melt from sea blue into something like the colour of children's cough medicine. At first it was blood red, but it became an almost creamy pink. The tip of the sun appeared over the rooftops and over the woods beyond them. I watched it rise, and as it did so, watched it turn from a mellow orange, to lemon, to yellow, to finally the colour of a blazing sun. Two things struck me: Firstly, how fast the whole phenomenon was over. Secondly, how the people who lived under those roofs toward the horizon had experienced all of this before me. In our hilly suburb, they would have seen the sun begin to appear over the woods perhaps a whole minute earlier. But even if the land were flat, those residents would still have seen the light emerge tiny fractions of a second before me.

Wow. I wouldn't exactly call it a religious experience, but I found it profoundly moving. I don't know if anyone else was even awake to experience it. For all I know it was just me and the sun.

Today is the exact three year anniversary of the failure of a magazine venture of mine. I was the editor, and this was the day we published our last issue, after my financial backers pulled the plug. We had other funding, which usually paid for all the editorial work, but it wouldn't cover any of the production costs, and we couldn't find anything else. So.

It was a magazine on contemporary art. I guess it might not be the most widely understood thing that a successful magazine needs a solid business case underneath it. You must understand the exact demographics that will buy your product. Who are they, and why will they buy? This must be rigorously thought through. You have to pitch them a proposition that fits (or invents) a gap in their lifestyle, and in order to do that, you have to be able to see your audience as a series of lacks, but be able to talk to them as a series of pluses. I guess I wasn't prepared to define the readership of my magazine in a negative way. Our research wasn't so very thorough after all.

I knew that I wanted it to be a challenging magazine, in that it presented the work and ideas of uncompromising artists, but also in the sense that it would interrogate them rather than offer an uncritical appraisal. At the same time, I didn't want the magazine to be the exclusive preserve of students, art theorists, and those on the inside of the industries built around visual art. I wanted it to be accessible to the people who buy a copy of Time Out, or read the Sunday supplements to get their cultural fix.

Our combination of incisive commentary and a broad appeal initially made it easy for us. We attracted financial backing, because we lucked upon a genuine gap in the market. Artists, curators and gallery directors were falling over themselves to have their work featured in a publication that would attract new visitors and prospective buyers. Our profile was high and, for a while, we sold above our expectations.

Finally though, it was my desire for a broad appeal that crippled us. Catering for such a wide range of groups meant there wasn't one genuine hook or set of hooks that would guarantee us a regular readership. At first we experimented by taking a more populist approach that was more critical of some of the work we had featured. When that failed, we tried to explore less accessible art and eschewed anything too resonant of traditional methods or ideas. Readers can quickly tell if a magazine is experiencing an identity crisis. They just stopped reading.

Today is also the exact two year anniversary of my divorce. We were only married a short time. Five years and four days. 'Still,' my parents would joke, in an unfinished sentence they shared between themselves, 'by today's standards ...' I found myself in the strange position of agreeing with them, even taking some pride in the idea that we lasted longer than most. I do not know the length of the average marriage, but this is the impression conveyed by the talk shows. So it was a hope more than anything else. When you are bitter, the things that matter most are so small they barely exist.

When we separated, I let myself go. I didn't cut my hair or keep in shape. I even wore running shoes to the office job I had to cover the bills. For months I carried on, getting fatter and sloppier. I used up all of my enthusiasm and pride surveying the history of my marriage. When you look at the disintegration of a relationship for long enough, you realise it resembles rain. At first there is a dampness to the air, which imperceptibly becomes a fine mist, and before you know it, a storm. Each drop of moisture is a feeling, forming a shapeless puddle at your feet. Precipitation is so called because the presence of a single particle can cause a much bigger event.

There was no infidelity or deceit between us. For this, family and friends were intensely grateful, as they were assured that an act of betrayal would have made the experience even more painful. It simply made it harder for me to apportion blame. She struggled to part on good terms. I wouldn't allow it.

Finally: Today is the exact one year anniversary of my father's death.

My parents were in an accident. As they sat and watched the television for lottery results, an articulated lorry crashed over the gate at the front of their small garden and through the outside wall. The cab of the vehicle stopped short of them by a couple of feet, but my mother was injured by falling plaster and debris. Her injuries meant she only lasted a few days. She was awake and talking to me when she passed.

My father clung to life. The first week, a month, three months, six, nine. By rights he should have survived, given the progress he had made. If survival was not the aim, then symmetry at least. My family has always loved reflections, precision, opposites, echoes. My father, like his before him, was a statistician, and an advocate of the Poisson distribution method. He found a discrete field of outcomes pleasing. It would grieve him to know he lived nine months and three days after the accident. Time brought new, larger units, an uneven number of which would just not do.

During those nine months, and with the doctors' help, his skin healed itself. His bones mended. Though still in hospital, he could sit and stand with ease, and walk his intravenous drip to the toilet. Toward the end of the ninth month, you could see he was aware of my own approaching milestone. On this occasion he feared symmetry; he was anxious of a pattern. Halfway through the ninth month, probably thanks to the stress, he succumbed to a chest infection. He was immunosuppressed so his body did not cope well. Still he held on, with a smile in his grey eyes.

On the day of the exact two year anniversary of my failed magazine, and the exact one year anniversary of my divorce, my father seemed in high spirits. He was animated, although his good temper was punctuated by coughing fits. We had lunch on the day. I brought a packet sandwich whilst he tucked into hospital portions of roast beef with potatoes and sprouts in gravy.

'Son,' he said at one point, pushing potato and a sprout to the back of his fork, 'did you hear about the truckload of terrapins that crashed into the van filled with tortoises last night on the motorway?'

'Sorry, no?'

'Oh ... it was a turtle disaster.'

And we laughed.

Soon after lunch he fell into a deep sleep. Over the next two hours his breathing slowed and he gently passed away. The doctors told me he suffered no pain. As I was by his side, they said, he was happy at the end. Still, I stayed with him for a while, to double check that he had really gone. I wasn't sure what it meant.

So, on the day of the exact three year anniversary of the failure of my magazine, the exact two year anniversary of my divorce, and the first year of my father's death, it is hard not to mistake this sunrise for a signifier of something else. A representation, or an interpretative act. The sun revealed itself as it changed the colour in the sky, as if attempting a kind of language. An expression of something that cannot be expressed by means other than sunrise. Maybe that is why I am learning to appreciate beautiful things.


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