[I start 2022 with every good intention of completing the January post-per-day ‘Bloganuary’ challenge. I seem to recall I’ve tried this kind of thing before and never even got to the end of the first week, but you never know…]

“What advice would you give to your teenage self?”

I haven’t been a teenager for almost fifty years and quite frankly I don’t think I’d choose to repeat the experience, even though at least some of it was fun at the time. Or at least I think it was.

However, the one thing I would strongly advise my teenage self to do is….not change anything.

I am more than content with where I am now and, as in the film ‘Sliding Doors’, there are so many possibilities and alternative courses of action being presented to us almost hourly that one even mundanely different choice at any stage could lead to a vastly different result and a completely different life.

There are plenty of things that I wish hadn’t happened in the course of my life, but the fact is they did – and I probably couldn’t have done much about them anyway. The real point is that they were all stepping stones towards this destination and I’ve ended up just exactly where and with whom I want to be.

All that being said, the single most important piece of advice I would give to my teenage self is this: ‘Boy, you make damned sure that you screw up the courage to ask that beautiful girl behind the bar for a date.’