Wednesday 19th October

Life is full of choices, some we take, some we fail to see, some we regret and some in fact are good ones.  Yet in spite of often poor choices most of us sort of work out okay in the end.  When I was only 22 I got a job as Assistant Financial Controller at The Royal Scot Hotel, just opened in Kings Cross.  I had been wages clerk for a couple of years before that and blagged my way into this job.  For years I had made terrible choices, running away from home and school just before my ‘A’ levels and a possible University education, getting the first girl I met pregnant, not once – but twice (three times actually – but who’s counting).  And one or two better choices, homeless I claimed we had furniture meaning we got an unfurnished but condemned flat in a matter of weeks, carrying on working despite becoming a single parent at age 20, and still believing in a possible better future.  But then I made maybe my worst choice.  I soon discovered in this new job that my immediate boss, the actual Financial Controller was an idiot who swanned around in and out of meetings all day and left me to do all the Financial Reporting, in those days without even a calculator, let alone a computer.  Computer?  This was 1972 and computers were only seen on telly, huge room size machines with tape reels and they could barely add numbers up.  Anyway, as luck (or mendacity) would have it he, my immediate boss, ran away with a couple of thousand in cash out of the safe one weekend.  I just carried on, plodding away, and filling in Daily and Weekly reconciliation sheets by hand.  In a few days time Company Auditors arrived and started going through our paperwork with the finest of toothcombs.  I had many discussions with them and they left re-assured that I was honest and doing a reasonably good job.  I was so stupid that I didn’t even realise that I had to apply for the miscreant’s job, I just assumed they would get someone new in despite me doing almost everything since the Hotel opened.  Anyway I did get the job after being told I had to write and ask for it.

Then I received an unusual request; to attend a meeting in Edinburgh (head office) and flights booked.  I wasn’t at all sure what to expect, a dressing down, the sack or maybe a move to another Hotel.  In fact it was a job offer.  The Company was starting a new department to introduce Computers into their Operation.  They were looking for bright young individuals to be recruited, and I was one of them.  But…..the job would be based in Edinburgh (a foreign country to me), I was a single Dad, I had just got my son settled in a good nursery and had been promised a proper flat in a block in Hackney.  So, I turned them down.  Anyway who knew how Computers would end up dominating our lives back then?  But maybe it wasn’t such a bad choice, pretty soon after I met Joy, a receptionist at the Hotel I would have had to leave if I had taken the job.  We married and had a lovely daughter….but choices again, that didn’t last and after five years she left me.  I have made many bad choices over the years too, too many to recall (how long have you got).  But one choice I never veered from.  I read constantly, I used to draw but now I write almost every day and I listen to music whenever I can.  Every day we face choices and life is indeed a lottery; if anyone knew the future it probably wouldn’t happen like that. And looking back I don’t regret a single choice, all experience is good, without the rain we cannot appreciate sunshine, and if nothing else it gives me something to write about.