I’d always considered myself as a confident and professional person. Well, I always knew what I was doing and that inspires a real sense of self-worth and satisfaction. As my mother would have said ‘a good day’s work for a good day’s pay’. I’m also a great believer in fate and I saw my future mapped out in pencil before me, taking me up to a well-deserved retirement. Not that I saw myself winding down in any way, my firm determination was always to grow old disgracefully. To surprise people by doing the unexpected.
I’ve spent my life always arriving early, not on time, but early. Always achieving a deadline and often so far in advance it’s embarrassing. I blame the fact that I went to a strict all girls’ school and in lots of ways it taught me to conform without actually thinking about anything. So I spent twenty years of my life, after bringing up our two sons, working in finance. I wish I could say I hated it so I would sound more interesting, but the truth is I loved every minute of it. Forecasting and budgeting is easy if you understand two basic things. How much have you spent to date (including anything committed) and what are you going to spend in the rest of the financial year. The moment it dawned on me that there are people out there who don’t understand that, gave me a mission in life. I was going to enlighten the masses. In reality, a lot of people I worked with didn’t want to be enlightened and saw managing their budgets as an onerous job that got in the way of the real work. But as the old saying goes, some you lose and some you win. The wins were worth the effort.
Willpower is an incredibly dangerous attribute. It took me until my early fifties to realise that mine had infact made my life much harder than it need have been. My problem is that I don’t know when to give up, because I seem unable to accept defeat. Then the reality dawned that I have probably changed the course of my destiny by rushing blindly forward at times, when I should have been sitting back and letting things happen in their own natural time. I have two other major flaws; people have told me I’m too nice for my own good (where ‘nice’ is a kindly criticism for ‘soft’). OK – I treat my cat like a third child and what I get back for the most part is distain and the odd swipe if he’s in a bad mood. Secondly, I want everything to happen instantly and I will work myself into the ground to achieve that. When God was giving out patience, I clearly caught him on an off day.
My creativity was stifled at school, I dabbled with art and was passable. Pottery was far too messy. Needlework was thoroughly enjoyable and came in very handy over the years. English instilled a love of poetry and was a flower that stayed buried deep within my heart. It surfaced occasionally over the years, resulting in a collection of hastily written scraps of paper kept in a cardboard box in the attic. Every time we moved and the box saw the light of day – well the removal van – I’d throw in the latest contributions and re-seal the box.
As I gaily continued my life’s work of inking in the pencilled lines of my future, little did I know what it really had in store for me.
I always knew I’d write a book some day and it was a thought I treasured. It was my secret pleasure and, ironically, the one thing for which I seemed to have an enormous amount of patience. It’s probably the only thing in my entire life that I have taken as a given and accepted gracefully. With hindsight that astounds me. I should also throw in at this point, that I’m also a Gemini and I have followed my daily forecast for more than thirty years.
Hitting fifty was a landmark for me. I gave up watching TV for three months and sat in front of the computer instead. I wrote a novel. I had no experience, having only penned the odd poem since the age of about fourteen. I had been a precocious child and was prone to writing scripts for my favourite TV programmes. The Man from Uncle had a whole unexplored future under my trust pen……………