ODE TO A GOLDEN FLIP-FLOP

For reasons that need not detain us here I only possess one pair of Kurt Geiger shoes and I wouldn’t possess those if they hadn’t come free with a magazine. For I am something of a Cinderella when it comes to shoes, or indeed other clothes too; if they’re not M & S, then something tell me that I’m getting ideas above my station.

Still back to Kurt Geiger. They are, these shoes that I possess, the most beautiful pair of golden flip-flops that you could ever wish for, with a degree of dainty-ness and magic that I imagine no other species of flip-flop could ever possibly possess. Indeed, the very name ‘flip-flop’ is a misnomer. This footwear is as about as far from the coarse plastic and rubber confection of the beach and sandpit as it is possible to travel. Indeed, they are a long way superior to other flip-flops on which Kurt Geiger’s initials mysteriously appeared when they became rapid substitutes for my golden ones, in the next consignment of the magazine firm’s largesse

It was as if these golden shoes were the genuine article made by master craftsmen - not flip-flops at all - but sandals worn by the Greek goddesses who partied and bickered on Mount Olympus. If Helen, perhaps, the goddess of beauty, or Athene, the mistress of the arts and crafts, had one day sat down to design proper footwear in which to wander through the celestial olive groves, or to launch a thousand ships, these would have been they.

Indeed they were probably worn, I said to myself, by Europa herself when she was abducted by the bull and carried over the sea to Crete. In paintings of the scene, you will note, the bull is always shown looking at Europa’s feet.

Alas, it is only when you lose something that you realise its true value. I have worn these sandals as slippers everyday since I proudly brought them home, the free gift for once of inestimably more value than the magazine. Since then I have wondered at their comfort, and their slimness and the exactness of their fit, how not an iota of material is wasted. How they are constructed so magically as to enable you to glide effortlessly and elegantly across even a hard floor in perfect silence. I have loved their golden colour, twinkling at me in the morning light and imagined we should never be parted.

So you can imagine my chagrin when stumbling down the stairs one dark morning last week I slipped and something seemed to snap and suddenly my flip (and my exuberance with it) flopped. Oh dear! The right thong had snapped, close to the sole, in a place where mending seemed out of the question. I was heart-broken.

I tried the staple gun, but I couldn’t get staples to purchase on the narrow end. Besides crude metal staples in the middle of the ultra-fine stitches of the golden thong seemed cultural barbarism of the worst sort. So I put them sadly aside but that evening I went in search of needle and thread.

Now let it be known that I don’t ‘do’ sewing. At least not since I astounded everyone - myself included - by coming top in needlework at Appleford Vilage School at the age of 7. After reaching that dignified career peak I knew that to do more would be to tempt fate most sorely and I have therefore sensibly desisted all attempts by needles of whatever length to lure me into further action. In vain did my Great Aunt try to make me knit. Only when fate leaves me no option, as when a button goes ‘zing,’ do I reach for what Great Aunt would have called my ‘huzif.’

The great goddess Athene was calling - and of course my feet were cold - and I had lost my shoes which combination might have moved Mount Olympus itself. With determination I threaded a fine needle and began to sew, as delicately as I could, searching for little edges on which I thought the cotton might hold. In and out, in and out.

And hold it did. With the same astonishment that greeted my seven year old needlework success, I found that I had repaired Athene’s sandal and, what’s more it took my weight when I flip-flopped up and down the stairs. Not only that but you can’t, unless you look very hard indeed, even see the repair.

If there is joy in the sinner that repenteth, the prodigal son that returns, in something lost being found, there is as least as much delight in feeling again the comfort and beauty of shoes that were broken but which are now repaired. Vivat Athene. Vivat Kurt Geiger. Vivat the Golden Shoes.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF......FENNIE

I roll out of bed, usually between 6.30 and 7. I like to be down in the kitchen anyway to listen to the 7 o’clock news while I am making my tea, and breakfast of porridge, followed by Activia Yoghurt flavoured with a spoon of Bonne Mamam Apricot Jam. Keeping one ear open for any radio interest, I catch up on yesterday’s paper and read a column or two. I like Jane Shilling especially who turns up in Times2 most Fridays. Then it’s back to bed I’m afraid.

If I have an article to write - which is about once a week - I will sit cross-legged in the bed sketching something out in longhand, but on other days I will chant for 20 minutes ‘Nam Mho Renge Kyo.’ This is a Buddhist chant I learned some years ago. I suppose its a form of meditation really. The words are medieval Japanese and are supposed to refer to the Universal Law of Cause and Effect - or in slightly other words: what goes around comes around.

Chanting is supposed to stir up the innermost recesses of the brain like the mud at the bottom of the pond and when it settles again it settles in a pattern slightly better than previously. And thus you progress onwards and upwards by little steps towards your own enlightenment.

I have no idea whether I am any more enlightened than when I started - but it is quite easy to use this time to let ideas come into your head about what I want to be doing later or how I might approach a problem. So it is not entirely a self-indulgence. And I miss it when I can’t do it.

Now it’s time to go to work. I work from home and commute from one end of the house to the other. To make this a more interesting journey however I take a turn outdoors around the block, which takes ten minutes provided I don’t get side-tracked into a long conversation by neighbours, walking dogs or running errands.

Although I write a few articles and sit on a UNESCO Committee, relics really of my previous existence in the world of matters ‘European,’ my main work is the little family labels business that we ‘inherited’ from my sister and brother in law. We sell stock labels and do some of our own printing, sub-contracting the more complicated jobs. J, my partner, does most of the actual printing as well as the packing and despatching, while I run the office, dealing with the orders, quotes and queries, the invoices and the bills and generally trying to balance the books. A lot of business is done on the telephone and of course these days by email.

We hold a stock of about 5 million labels, which sounds a lot, and we sell about 350,000 in an average month. Our labels go all over Britain and occasionally to Ireland, all to businesses and shops. But they are not going to make our fortune. Nor is it a business that is growing. Still it provides a living for the two of us and we are our own bosses.

Our warehouse is the garage which we converted to two rooms for J’s Mother in Law when she came to live with us towards the end of her life. Unfortunately we have also had to relinquish the dining room, though as we rarely used this anyway it was no great loss. No matter we have a large and friendly kitchen.

Half way through the morning I force myself to do ten minutes of exercising - stretches and sit-ups and some running. I have done these for years and they keep me supple. Mid-morning however is the only time I feel I have sufficient energy to do them.

Lunch is usually taken on the run as my to-do list will be lengthening: some scrambled egg, perhaps, and a piece of fruit. Then quickly back to the grindstone. At four o’clock we label up all the parcels and one of us takes them down to the Post Office - a 500 yard walk away. Usually this is me and it’s an opportunity to shop for any odds and ends we need at the same time.

Then it’s back to the desk, finishing off the day, checking emails again,and carrying out the end of day routines. I try to finish by 6.30, to allow time for a little bit of evening chanting and then to prepare a quick supper and a welcome glass of wine. Again we take turns to do this.

Sometimes in the evenings we go out, drive into Cardiff to see a film perhaps. Or I may have a committee meeting of some sort. If I’m in a play - for I belong to the local drama group - then I’m out rehearsing 7.30 to 10. Occasionally, if we are very busy, then I will do an evening shift on the printer or even go back to the office. I rarely watch television apart from the 10 o’clock news. It’s not great news but the pictures are valuable.

Then its almost time for bed - a catch up with the paper perhaps - a snack of an oatcake and a little bit of butter and then up to glorious bed to read - if I’m not too exhausted - until turning the light out, ideally by 11.30, though it’s frequently later. I’m reading Helen Mirren’s entertaining autobiography at the moment.

A TOUCH OF THE BLUES

After last week’s frustrating affair of the bathroom tap*, I am left a trifle curmudgeonly towards the world and its works this morning. “You are feeling vexed and sad,” I said as I lay in a post-alarm snooze preparing to haul myself from the womb-like embrace of the duvet. “Do something about it!”

But now that I have had time to reflect, ‘doing something about it’ is indeed at least part of the problem. I have been trying to ‘do something about it’ ever since January 1st - though the ‘it’ that I am trying to do something about now comes in more guises than an oriental genie.

Such new found determination would be commendable if one were actually succeeding in the doing department, but as often as not by the mid-January start of the Islamic new year I am left contemplating a sorry wreckage of abandoned good intentions, made in haste and now being forgotten, if not repented of, at leisure.

That waist line which I promised myself would in a few short weeks be again svelte and elegant, (once, I remind myself incredulously, I had a 26 inch waist) stubbornly refuses to pay any attention to scientific efforts to change my eating habits, while my time discipline - the promise to find an hour for reading, relaxation, exercise, cooking and what not, is already a broken casualty of the unexpected. The more I push, the more it seems the world pushes back. Vexing indeed, and enough to send even the brightest souls in search of the chemical happiness of a St John’s Wort tablet.

Having agreed, for instance, in a misplaced spirit of festive generosity to provide house room for my friend Helen’s elderly and incontinent bitch while she herself was on holiday, I spent the first few days cleaning up not only the inevitable damp patch, but full blown puddles as well. Avoiding further mishaps necessitated a work-interrupting trek into the garden mud every few hours, which left me momentarily debating whether puddle or mud damage was easiest to clear from the carpet. My brisk New Year Resolution to become a better housekeeper with a prettier, more comfortable house, lies in tatters.

My newly pledged bedtime reading is looking equally forsaken. Instead of happily reading for half an hour before lights out, I don a thick coat and boots and parade up and down in the cold rain on the soaking night-time grass until the wretched animal has ‘performed’ and I can retreat safely to the welcoming lights of civilisation.

As if this wasn’t vexing enough I had another touch of the blues when Helen’s son arrived to collect the dog after her ‘holiday’. I should have been happy that, this time, once the carpets had been dysoned they would stay dysoned, at least for a few days, and that I would at last be able to make serious progress in catching up with those improving literary periodicals like the Spectator and the London Review of Books.

But with typically female contrariness I found that I was not happy at all. With no dog to wind herself around my legs and halt uncannily in whichever doorway I intended to pass through forcing me to buffet her aside with my knee while trying not to spill hot tea along her back, the house suddenly seemed curiously empty.

There was no big-eyed canine face peering eagerly out of the darkness when I came down to the kitchen each the morning. No dark shape looming behind the glass of the door when I returned from the shops. No rough coat to reach out and stroke, no back to scratch. No one to follow me, thump, thump, up the stairs and down.

Perhaps it is a fancy to pretend that we can accommodate such unexpected events while keeping our Resolutions. Maybe next year there should be no more resolutions, though I suspect that is easier said than done. What after all is one to do in the guilt-tinged euphoria of an otherwise grey year end?

Not all is gloom and doom however, for I was taken to the cinema the other evening by a family friend. “£10.10 for the two,” he said, as I profferred some money for my ticket. And then by way of explanation: “You see I got a concession.”

“You could have got one for me as well”, I said grumpily.

“Mmm,” he mused. “But I never think of you, Fennie, as a concession, you always seem so young.”

“Flatterer!” I thought. Yet isn’t it nice when someone makes your day?

*For those attentive readers agog to know the sequel to my obsolete bathroom tap, I did try Araldite and so far (touches forest!) it is working still.

CHANGE? ALL THAT CHANGES ARE THE TAPS

CHANGE? ALL THAT CHANGES ARE THE TAPS

For someone old enough to remember hearing Bob Dylan first singing ‘The Times They Are a-Changing’ in that scratchy, strangely-pitched voice that suggested an urgent replacement of the gramophone needle or a particular sharp attack of radio atmospherics, the current political focus on ‘Change,’ the zeitgeist of our time, seems to ring rather hollow.

The word is now a mantra on both sides of the Atlantic. Private Eye caricatures Gordon Brown’s ‘Age of Change,’ while over in New Hampshire, Barak Obama tub-thumps ‘Change’ until his voice becomes almost as hoarse and ethereal as Dylan’s.

All of which leaves me at a loss. ‘Change what?’ I am prompted to ask - and in what direction? Lots of things can no doubt be improved - but changed?

Back in the sixties, of course, times really were a-changing. All sorts of revolutions were opening new vistas to us young hopefuls. Everywhere the shackles of dependence were breaking, the castles of deference tumbling down, to be replaced by a vast explosion of creativity. Anything was possible: Kennedy even promised the moon. What is more he delivered it.

The pill set women on a new path to freedom - a revolution in which men were eager and willing beneficiaries. There was another revolution in transport. The jet aeroplane and the universality of the motor car led our generation on journeys to new frontiers. Unlike all previous decades, the sixties were also, in Britain at least, a time of peace. War was something against which we protested, but with which we were not directly involved.

That was change; that was a release from what had gone before. Independence, liberation were the watchwords. The tectonic plates of the national and international consciousness were moving. The echoes of Dylan’s song, the fine aspirations of Kennedy’s inaugural address, have been ringing down the decades ever since. That was real change.

You may ask what has prompted this nostalgic exercise in sentiment. Is it the universal greyness and drizzle of a Welsh January? No, it was going yesterday into our local ironmonger in search of one of those plastic widgets that fit inside a bath tap that made me think about the superficiality of today’s ‘change.’

Now our local ironmonger is a most welcoming emporium, one of those unchanging shops that pretends heroically not to have noticed that fifty eight years have elapsed since 1950. The building is low-ceilinged and dark; in a warren of backrooms and alcoves, and in the drawers of ancient cabinets, you can no doubt still find the necessaries to repair a stagecoach.

While my bathroom tap may be elderly, it does not quite date from the stagecoach era. It is rather a fine gold plated tap, the business end of which consists of a brass spindle cut with fine grooves that engage a plastic widget that in turn engages with the external fancy part of the tap - the bit that you attempt to turn with your toes as you lie soaking in some thoughtful Christmas present.

You have spotted the weakness already! A piece of plastic engaged by two pieces of metal will not last for ever. Eventually, however much your toes may twiddle, the fancy top no longer drives the brass bottom. It’s a case of ‘Houston! We have a problem.’ So off to my kind ironmonger I trot.

You would think that such widgets would be universally obtainable - like lamp fuses. If so you would have thought wrongly. My kindly ironmonger pulled a wry face, explaining that every tapmaker inevitably produced his own widgets and only a tap-specific widget would fit. Moreover as tapmakers were as much slaves to modern fashion as anyone else, I would have to buy a whole new tap.

But this is a mixer tap for a bath and it matches the mixer tap on the basin. Do I then have to replace two expensive sets of mixer taps for the sake of a twopenny-ha’penny bit of plastic? That would amount to something on the scale of a government grant.

Sadly I turn to the internet where prices are half those in the shops. But then I suffer a pang of guilt. Haven’t I just driven another nail into the coffin of my kind ironmonger standing behind his counter installed by one of his ancestors in 1890 and where you can always find someone you know on a similar quest for domestic ancillaries?

Change it would be indeed to liberate us from such marketing tyranny. Change it would be to deliver us from the mindset that more is better. But, as we are told that is what ‘drives’ the economy, keeping us all in beer and skittles, I don’t suppose politicians will want to change that at all. Even, that is, if they could. Perhaps I shall just try Araldite instead.

BUT WHERE WOULD YOU HAVE PUT PURPLE COO, MR FRANKLIN

I was fascinated to see another of Ben Schott’s miscellanies in The Times the other day, this one for 2008. I adore all of Schott’s miscellanies, indeed I am a magpie when it comes to random, but interesting, bits of knowledge. I love them for the same reason that I love charity shops - you never know what you are going to find. Both are a cornucopia - to use Rumsfeld’s expression - of unknown unknowns.

I suppose I am of an age when schools considered it their job to prepare you for the unknown. The syllabus was considered merely as an irritating guide to what books to read; provided you were learning something it didn’t really matter what. Such attitudes, sadly, went by the wayside a long time ago. No longer are we educated and left to do things on our own initiative, we have to be ‘trained.’

Still, while Ben Schott continues to turn out his marvellous miscellanies the quest for random knowledge goes on. Included in his eclectic calendrical list of ‘Ephemerides’ you can find the colours that beekeepers paint Queen Bees each year to distinguish this year’s bee from last; and Benjamin Franklin’s schedule for an Ideal Day.

Now I have to confess to being a fan of Benjamin Franklin who was born poor in what then weren’t the United States. His is the classic rags to high politics story - he went on to sign the Declaration of Independence making the immortal remark - ‘Gentlemen, we must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.’ And not only politics, but science too. In his spare time he invented the lightning conductor and determined the course of the Gulf Stream.

And it was all done, not by vast intelligence, but by application and perseverance combined with a few well-thought out basic principles. Nevertheless, from his many biographies one question shrieks out: however did this man organise his time to get so much done?

Now I am someone who agonises about my time - how can I get more out of my day while still managing to remain sane and amused? I think most of us harbour a secret belief that others organise themselves better than we do. In fact trying to understand how other people run their lives is part of the fascination of blogging, or reading diaries. So to learn the Great Man’s recipe for organisation, just in time to make a New Year Resolution, seems propitious.

Benjamin Franklin’s ‘schedule’ is admirably simple. He divides the day into six periods of which two are for work, the remaining ones being morning, (pre-work); dinner, (between work); evening, (after work); and sleep. It is a fairly common pattern. We wake up, dress and have breakfast. Then we work, stop for lunch and work again. Then we finish work, eat some food, relax a bit and go to bed. But how much time do we allocate to each?

Split between these six periods my own average day looks like 2, 4, 0.5, 5, 5, 7.5. I find it hard to get from alarm clock to my office in under two hours, though this includes a morning walk and certainly some planning and newspaper reading. I work about nine hours but find it hard to manage much more than half an hour for a quick lunchtime snack. Sometimes I work a bit in the evening, but it depends on what you call ‘work.’ Certainly I do housework, like most of us I suspect.

I know I don’t read enough, relax enough, take enough exercise, but I still feel guilty about taking two hours to ‘get-up.’ On the other hand it is about the only time I get to myself.

Franklin’s schedule is interesting and reassuring. He actually takes three hours to get ready, rather than my two, filling this period with useful self-discipline such as ‘contriving the day’s business’ and ‘taking the ‘resolution of the day.’

He then works for four hours before taking a two hour lunch (or rather dinner as it was then the custom to take the main meal at midday) while reading or perusing his accounts. Then another four hours of work and he is ready (after ‘putting things away’) for ‘supper, music or diversion,’ while reviewing what he has achieved. Seven hours of sleep follows.

He acknowledges that he can’t always structure his time like this and he did have the advantage that most of his domestic arrangements were taken care of. Even so the balance of his day between work and other activities is interesting, his long lunch and three hour ‘morning’ providing all sorts of opportunities to better balance the day with ‘non-work’ tasks and reading.

Even so, can I really afford a two hour lunch? And where would he have slotted Purple Coo, I wonder?

Bah Humbug!

Bah Humbug! Christmas is over! Or is it? For sitting in my hall are four boxes of presents all in their bright tinsel wrappings and complete with the buttons and bows that took me until half-past eleven last night to affix: the children's (and the children's partners) presents. Yes, today is another Christmas and day of feasting.

For me this has been a sort of 'before and aft' Christmas, starting with one great family party (over two days) the weekend before and finishing with today's extravaganza. But of course it won't end there, for there will be something no doubt at New Year, followed by something else on New Year's Day and then our traditional Twelfth Night entertainment on 6 January, to test the stomach just when it thought it was recovering.

For the first time that I can remember we actually spent Christmas Day alone this year and it was wonderful! Just to be able selfishly to listen over breakfast to the News Quiz review of the year and then to 'With Great Pleasure' on Radio 4. To be able to cook something simple - we chose to have a venison casserole - and afterwards to curl up with a Christmas present book. Knowing my love of history, J had bought me 'The Other Boleyn Girl' - the fascinating account of Anne Boleyn's younger sister. In the evening we watched 'Love Actually' - not the greatest of films, indeed positively silly and cringe worthy in many places, but infused with such happiness as to make almost perfect entertainment.

All of which prompts me to ask - what, exactly is Christmas for? Now that may sound like the sort of question asked by every vicar in every pulpit at some point in the festive season - but Christmas, in Britain at least, ceased long ago to have any relation to the religious festival that is held confusingly at the same time and under the same name.

The religious festival I can understand - it is the rest of it that has left me grasping for the plot in a manner that happens frequently when I am trying to follow Midsomer Murders. What are we all really trying to do - for what happens in my experience bears as little relation to the ostensible objective of 'having fun' as ice and snow on Christmas cards do to the mild wetness of a south British December.

I mean if you are really wanting to eat well - then why on earth eat Turkey, which is held in such low esteem the rest of the year that it is one of the cheapest meats you can buy? Do people's taste buds become anaesthetised in December so that cardboard tastes suddenly succulent?

And why if we are wanting to enjoy a family day do we so arrange to eat and drink ourselves into a kind of stupor, sometimes even before we sit down? In the middle of the day excess alcohol is just about the biggest antidote to pleasure that it is possible to imagine

Presents are supposed, one imagines, to give pleasure both to the giver and the receiver. But frequently it seems the only person that benefits is the shopkeeper.

The value of a present does not lie in its bigness, or brashness or even its price; it lies in how appropriately it fills some little niche in the receiver's life. There are few people who know how to give presents. Whole books ought to be devoted to this for most of us are hopeless at it. How often do we ask - what would you like for Christmas? - worse we give our families vouchers and tell them to choose a present for themselves - a classic opt-out from the difficult, though rewarding business, of present choosing.

That defeats the whole object of a present, which is the surprise and delight at receiving something, however small, that you would never have thought of buying for yourself but which is so geared to one's fancies that it is precisely 'right.'


My neighbour, Annie, who happens to be French, is an expert at this. She doesn't buy much - but everything usually turns out to be a delightful surprise. Somehow she manages to tune in to some inner need and suddenly there is something priceless in the foil wrapping.

LETTER TO A 13 YEAR OLD FENNIE

Being tagged is a mixed pleasure: on the one hand one is pathetically pleased to be remembered; on the other it means that the mind can no longer roam free over the week’s events in search of something to set the keys a-clattering. Being tagged in fact actually forces you to think, which is what I have been trying to do, since I stumbled across the flattering message from ElizabethM and the summons to confront my 13 year old self.

Now my 13 year old self (a kind of sad cross between an erstwhile Mademoiselle Grognonne and Minnie the Minx) has long passed into history and a good thing too. But since being resurrected, last Friday, she has hovered again inside my head like the ghost of Christmas past, reminding me of all sorts of things I thought had been well and truly consigned to the oubliette of history. This experience has been akin to finding an old newspaper at the bottom of a drawer and marvelling at the gaucheness of the advertisements for soap.

Still I am not sure that the fads and fancies of the 13 year old Fennie - or Fenella - as she was in those starchly cold days of the waning 1950s, would really make amusing reading. Like every teenager she was a complete cake mix of hormones, nerves, angst, trauma, chronic mental instability, rebellion and general sadness. She longed to ‘grow-up’ - something that her parents promised would happen with unfailing regularity, but which never quite did.

Indeed, one of the most disappointing moments in young Fennie’s life was bouncing out of bed on her first teenage morning only to find she was exactly the same person who had gone to bed the evening before. Instead of being greeted in the mirror by a young Aubrey Hepburn look-alike, all smiles and confidence, there appeared only the same unflattering bundle of frizzy hair and spots.

Of course every teenager, believes, indeed knows for an incontrovertible fact, that the angst they are experiencing is the severest angst ever to have been experienced by anyone, anywhere, at any time. To imagine that grown-ups might have experienced the same thing is quite beyond comprehension and certainly just about the least comforting thing a teenager might ever wish to hear.

Besides Fennie at 13 was a little pig-headed. Everything that adults said was a plot to sabotage her free-spirit. Trying to work matters out from first principles is a slow and painful way of proceeding, though as a way of getting practice in ‘pick yourself up dust yourself down,’ it cannot be faulted.

So, little Fenella, I don’t expect you will heed any of the advice I shall give to you. But there are things that you don’t recognise now as important, partly because of your age and partly because of circumstances. So I shall confine myself to four pieces of wisdom - from which you neither need to recoil or rebel.

First, pay attention to family. Divorce has shattered yours but in later years you will come to appreciate the usefulness of being related to a wide web of people. You will bring happiness to them and they to you. Time invested in family affairs will bring dividends out of all proportion. And never be afraid of hugging!

Secondly, you know that what you get out of life depends on what you put into it. However, what you put in must be what life wants to have, not what you decide is good for it. If someone is hungry there is no point in giving them gold. Everybody needs something - possibly something as small as a smile. Learn what each person wants and give them that. Do not give what is not wanted.

Thirdly, learn to do the minimum. This may seem strange advice. Doesn’t everyone tell us ‘to do our best?’ Most people attempt much more than the minimum; they may aim high but they rarely achieve that minimum, properly and completely. They deliver not enough of what is really wanted and too much of what isn’t. So ask yourself always what the minimum is. Then deliver it - on time, properly, without fuss.

Fourthly, in a few short years you will be embarking on a career. My advice is to choose something that will always be in demand, which you can practice in any country, which you can step away from and if necessary go back to. Something like medicine, for instance.

Do not expect instant success. Do not expect to be a film star, or a great writer or to marry a fortune or any other shortcut that girls dream about. You have been through and will continue to go through some tough times. But soon you will shed your adolescent coat. Look inside yourself in the quiet moments and you will go far.