What I know now I am in my forties

You cannot be everyone’s friend. As a teenager, I suffered endless painful angst about the fact that I wasn’t everyone’s friend. In my late teens and early twenties, I stopped caring (pretty much around the time I gave up exercise and took up drinking). In my thirties, when I got married and had my children, and when I finally learnt to empathise, I started to care again. Now that I am in my forties, it’s not so much that I don’t care any more, because I do, deeply. But I am content to live with the undeniable truth that not everyone likes me and that’s ok. And, amazingly, I don’t like everyone, and that’s also ok.

Politeness and respect are really important. I have a heap of unresolved, unresolvable, retrospective guilt which visits me usually in the middle of the night and won’t leave me alone, and it’s basically about when I have been rude or unkind to people in the past. I remember my mother saying it to me, and I now say it to my children: “Don’t treat people unkindly or disrespectfully, because you will regret it in the future..” She was right, I do regret it.

Experiences are much more valuable than material possessions. You remember experiences for ever. You rarely remember material possessions (except my beautiful green bike from circa 1976 which I may have mentioned before…) Kids says they want the latest eye-wateringly expensive gadgets for Christmas or their birthday. But they get more fun, laughter and memories out of an experience.

You never have enough money. Well, you do if you’re Bill Gates. But in recognition of the fact that most of us are not, we pretty much never have enough money. It’s like that annoying physics of packing for a holiday: the combined weight and size of all the clobber you want to put in your suitcase is greater than the sum of its separate parts. Your total income will always be roughly 10% less than you require your outgoings to be, no matter how fiercely you budget, and that percentage is greater at Christmas time (unless you are my best friend N in which case you probably have your whole life organised in a spreadsheet and you never have and never will overspend).

You cannot outwit a bureaucracy. It always flipping catches up with you in the end. It’s usually better to just accept this fact and not even try.

Even if you do not try nor have ever tried to outwit a bureaucracy, at some point the bureaucracy will believe you to be attempting to outwit it even if it has not a scrap of supporting evidence.  It’s usually because someone has inadvertently spelt your name wrong and consequently a computer has you confused with a tax evader or mass murderer. When this happens, until someone actually takes an axe to the computer in question, you will be tarred with this brush for the rest of your days.

No transfer of domestic power supplier ever goes smoothly. Live with it.