Despite some of the things that have happened to me in life, I actually regard myself as quite lucky; although I realise that, in writing this, I’m making myself a hostage to fortune. I have a great family which I’m very proud of, a wife I regard as my best friend, live in a very nice part of an area that I love, have renovated our flat so that it is how we want it and, without earning a great deal of money from it (yet), do for a living what I wanted to since as long as I can remember. I also have my health. On the downside, I support Spurs, who are currently performing as badly as they have done since I started watching them and show no signs of being able to sort out the mess that is the club. I should also have retired some years ago but still have a mortgage to pay and a young daughter to see through university. So, my point today is?
Well, it’s about perseverance; that determination to keep going and take on new challenges at an age when many opt for cardigan and slippers. What I call “getting on with life”. To me, one of that lucky generation, it seems perfectly natural to do this and to try to continue to live my dreams. We grew up during the staid times that were the 1950’s and lived through the social explosion that was the 1960’s (something I got a slice of in the 70’s). I, therefore, feel an obligation, in later life, to demonstrate what those times were all about. Even more so, given the mean spiritedness of our current government. So, I persevere.
I have to admit that I don’t always find it easy but, as a friend of mine once said, “It beats the alternative”, which is not to keep going. The problem with the latter is that you never know whether your dreams might have come true if you hadn’t kept chasing them. To quote Arnold Palmer, “The harder I practice, the luckier I get”. Interestingly, I had little idea what I was going to write about today when I started, yet something that I hadn’t expected has happened just because I kept going. So, persevere, it certainly does beat the alternative and it confounds those who don’t think us “ordinary people” can be any better than we are. We can. We just need to show it more often.