A Hard Lesson

I've always had a bit of a talent for feeling sorry for myself. Fortunately I can recognise this in myself which is a bit of a help in controlling what seems to be almost an instinct.

I was lucky enough to once be given a sharp, memorable shock regarding this aspect of my behaviour around about my twenty-first birthday. In fact, the birthday of itself was integral to what happened.

I was at university in my final year and too busy to celebrate the afore-mentioned birthday. Truth be told, birthdays were not something I had ever celebrated to any great degree, parties and the like being not something my family did - or could afford, I suppose. But I didn't terribly miss them and had always felt pretty well-done by as a kid at that time of year. However, by this particular birthday I'd been exposed to a different sort of world to that of my childhood. I had come to know people from reasonably prosperous backgrounds who knew how to have a good time when they could. Luckily for me these were usually generous sorts who'd extended their sense of the good life to include myself and I'd happily benefited.

Generally I don't think I suffered from any great jealousy regarding their good fortune, but for some reason, at least on one night, I found myself really, really wanting my birthday to be marked in some special way, but knowing it wasn't to be. Embarrassingly I phoned Mum and sort of told her how glum I felt, I suppose expecting some sort of consolation.

What she actually said went something like this: When my Dad was twenty-one he'd spent his birthday along with lots of other young fellows up to his backside in the crap of war and I was lucky to be as privileged as I was, allowed an education and a good life I'd done nothing to deserve.

It hurt, and I was fiercely angry for about two or three seconds, at which point the absolute truth of what she had to say hit powerfully home - and I simply agreed.

That's a moment I try and recapture when I'm unhealthily luxuriating in feelings suspiciously similar to those of that night all those decades ago. Unfortunately I still harbour that destructive talent. Fortunately I've had the best kind of lesson to deal with it. Unfortunately I'm a slow learner.