STAN CULLIMORE

HERE'S something I've never understood, dear reader.

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Can you help me? How does someone like me, your humble hack from the West Country, go from being ignored by all and sundry (even though I know exactly what I’m talking about) to being widely accepted as an expert on a subject? Someone to be respected, admired and looked up to. It’s a tricky one.

The reason I ask is simple. For years, I've been telling anyone who will listen that outcomes in later life can often be determined by the thousand small decisions we make each day. And for all those years, absolutely no one has listened to me. Not a single solitary soul, not a single solitary word. It feels like I've been casting pearls before swine. Though, in all fairness, I can’t imagine many pigs would want to eat pearls. So, maybe that wasn’t the best thing to be doing with pearls. Or my words of wisdom.

Most of the people I’ve been saying these things to have been family members and, as anyone out there with a family might already know, they're not very good at giving any form of respect to older, wiser folk. Like little old West Country hacks. Sigh. Or maybe that’s just my family.