What We Do?

Have I ever been successful? Well, let me rephrase that. Have I ever felt successful? I guess I have had a successful career, less than stellar, but I’ve always been employed, so that must count as some sort of success. I have never much liked it, so the success is arguable. Most of my jobs have ended less than well. That’s not completely true, but, you know, true enough. I’m a little too outspoken. I’ve learnt to censor myself as I have got older, but if that is success, or growth, it’s kind of sad really. Learn to say less.

I studied the wrong thing at uni. I went to Swinburne and to think around the same time I was there their creative writing course was in its infancy.

My tier one private school advised me wrongly on what to do with my life. "Business student, business student." Even when I expressed an interest in architecture in year 12 when choosing courses, the careers woman laughed at me and said, “You don’t have maths, or physics, you can’t do architecture.”

I wish mum had insisted I went to Preshill School and not my normal private school to which my dad insisted I follow my brother. “Oh, you are Will Fletcher’s little brother?”

“Yes.”

Incredulous look. “You are nothing like him, now are you?” (not meant as a compliment)

“No.”

I wish I hadn’t been sent to my mother’s sisters farm with my sister in the school holidays in my early teenage years, where my poisonous aunt repeatedly told me I’d never amount to anything. Actually, it was way worse than even that. She was a horror. (was it poetic justice that she died at 99 3/4 and didn't make it to 100? Yeah, sure it was. Her family can never claim that for her)

I wish that piano teacher hadn’t said I was too old at 6 to start leaning the piano. I think my life may have been quite if I’d know how to play the piano from a young age.

Have I ever felt successful? I don’t know. No. What does that even mean? What does success mean?

Doing what you are good at? Maybe. And enjoying it, of course. Doing what you love?

What am I good at? Well? Er? Um? I can write. Okay, I know that much, without trying to sound immodest.

I’m good at growing plants in pots, my house is full of indoor plants. 

I can bake a cake.

I love architecture.

I’m really knowledgeable about cars. 

Truthfully, I should have left school and got a mechanic apprenticeship. I could have had a little workshop somewhere now and have been happily restoring VW Beetles. (Have you seen the price of vintage VW Beetles now a days?) Reciting poetry. With a nursery attached. And perhaps some baked goods.

You know writing that, it really suggests to me I should move to the country. I just pictured trees and rolling hills and open spaces. An old red brick barn just out of town somewhere on a back road. Up early and cook some apricot pastries, or lemon muffins. An espresso machine. Play some arias, ha ha, some, Aretha Franklin. 

I could bake bread. I have never cooked bread, I don’t know why I have never baked bread? But it sounds like a lovely thing to do. Bread in a basket on a gingham table cloth on a wrought iron table under a tree next to the workshop, with a country road winding its way through the valley off into the distance.