ADVICE FOR THE KIDS

The family are absent, the cats are asleep - I'm just reflecting on a visit to a collectors' fair in the middle of Norwich that I visited yesterday. I wandered around the flintknapped cobbled yard of what used to be the printing department of Norwich City College before it was incorporated into the main block of buildings across the other side of the city.
I was stepping back in time - it had been forty years since my feet had touched the uneven history-soaked walkway. Three floors up on the tiled roof was a tiny skylight window - and the memory of hanging my head out into the cool autumn sunshine and vomitting freely into the gutter will never leave my brain. This was the result of a lunchtime spent pickling my teenage-angst powered broken heart in glass after glass after glass of double whiskey with dry ginger - it was not clever - but it did succeed in wiping clean the name of a lady called Barbara from my thoughts - so, mission accomplished.
The stone steps to the old wooden door of the canteen looked inviting - I wanted to go inside, get a cheese and onion roll, a cup of black coffee and settle down with Wrighty, Mobsy, Kraut and Taffy Evans for an hour long session of three-card brag - the freedom, wit and laughter of those days can never be replaced.
Forty years - just a click of the fingers, blink and it's gone - how do I impart this uncomfortable fact to my two twenty-something kids? Yesterday you were at school, today you're free to shake the world, tomorrow you'll have grey hair and two twenty-something kids - and what's more, you'll be standing where I am today, looking up at a skylight.
Use this time of freedom, stand proud and impregnable - don't take any crap from people whose motives relate to their own needs - and don't take advice from people who have failed to achieve inner happiness. Nobody will give you respect unless you deserve it. Avoid the trends of mass movement, most people are sheep heading for the metaphorical slaughter-house. The difference between a diamond and a lump of coal is only where it's been and what it's seen.
Be diamonds - so when you look up at that skylight in the future - like me, you can smile.