A Reading Day Methinks

Aspirations

When you have nothing, and see those who have ‘made it’ you have aspirations/dreams, you want the house with a dozen bedrooms, the flashy motor car. The problem is how to achieve those dreams/aspirations. Kids always have ideas about what they want in later life — when they are “making it”. As kids we used to look at status symbols, but we had no idea what the words status or symbols meant back then, just that some people had things that we aspired to. For most kids they would have ‘made it’ if they owned a Rolls or a Bentley, for me that was boring, what I wanted was something sporty, sleek and, above all, fast, something like a Porsche, an Alfa Romeo, or a Lamborghini — yes, I had taste even as a kid. I am talking about being a kid in the 1950s, things were happening back then, Edmund Hillary was conquering Everest, Polar exploration was in full swing, speed records were being broken all over the place — there were heroes for all of us kids to admire. Some kids wanted to climb mountains, some wanted to be the fastest to sail round the world, there was one kid who wanted to be the first to ride a bicycle at 100mph (I never figured out how he expected to do that). Apparently a guy called Jullius Prayogo achieved 178.2 km/h (110.7 mph) on a flat road in 2019. Me, well, I wanted to be Donald Campbell in Bluebird, speed fascinated me back then. I remember reading, or hearing somewhere, the phrase ‘live fast and die young’, I guess that as I didn’t ‘die young’ I really didn’t live quite fast enough. With that glorious science of hindsight I guess that I did a lot of things that were perhaps not good, but I don’t regret a single moment, or a single thing that I have done in my life. I have upset, annoyed and pissed off many people over the years, but I never, intentionally, hurt any one. From my point of view if people were upset, annoyed or pissed off with me, then that was their problem, not mine. These days, the opening years of my eighth decade, the aspirations have somewhat changed, these day they are more about bits of the world that I want to see — so many places, and so little time left methinks.