Mr Burns was Right.

When I was fifteen, my form teacher at school told me I should be deciding on a career path. The right ‘A’ levels needed to be selected so as to prepare for an appropriate degree course.

Life was different then. Apart from anything else, the jobs market was very labour-intensive – and I lived in an industrial area where the main choices were the factories, the mines and the steelworks. The arts were not encouraged. What nod was made towards them was peremptory at best, and nobody gave any thought at all to a career in fields like fine art, music, photography, drama, graphic design... The choice was simple: most kids left school and simply ‘got a job,’ a few of the more able ones went for an apprenticeship in one of the trades, and the tiny, select minority headed for university and entered a profession. It seemed I was one of the select minority, and so I considered the possibilities.

I thought back over my short life to date, asking what it was that had most held my interest. One thing stood out: I had always had a passion for landscape. So how could I turn that into a professional career? No sort of creative or artistic approach entered my head; I’d never been conditioned to think that way and nobody suggested it. All I could come up with was geology, so that was decided upon.

It would have been a bad choice, I think; geology is far too technical and has little relevance to my predilections. I wasn’t to realise that for a long time, but the problem was averted anyway when my step-father flatly refused to let me stay at school. I left, as ordered, at sixteen.

The penny dropped when I was thirty two. By then I’d made a succession of attempts at careers that had been wholly inappropriate. I’d tried them and let them all go. And then I re-discovered an interest that had simmered during my childhood: photography. I put the pieces together and realised that my interest in landscape wasn’t technical, it was aesthetic. More than that, it ventured into a vague area that you might call spiritual or mystical. I spent the next two years diligently training myself to a professional level in photography. At thirty five, a series of circumstances conspired to turn my life upside down, and one of the consequences was that it freed me to go into a photographic career. I took the opportunity with great enthusiasm.

I spent the first two years living decreasingly on my capital as the work built up. The next two years were the boom ones; I made enough money to start rebuilding that capital. The next two years saw a steady decline as the recession bit, until there was nothing left. No money, no work, and no prospects. I was living up in Northumberland at the time where I hardly knew anybody. I didn’t have the means to socialise, and so I was left a bit in limbo.

And then a friend from back home offered me the use of a small house he’d inherited. We could come to some agreement on the rent, he said, and I couldn’t see that I had any alternative but to accept. I moved back to the industrial town where I’d grown up, feeling a bit disappointed at the way things had turned out. Actually, I was quite depressed. I decided the solution lay in making contact with people again.

That was why I started doing voluntary work at a professional producing theatre only ten minutes walk away. I soon fell in love with the place. I felt at home among the actors and production staff, I became quite close to the Theatre Manager – a lovely lady called Judy Bowker who subsequently died of cancer aged forty four, I met the woman who was to become the most important person in my life, I eventually got a paid job there - which was the only ‘employed’ position I ever enjoyed - and I even did some photographic work for them. It was one of the richest and most fulfilling periods in my life.

And the reason for telling all this? ‘The best laid plans o’ mice ’n men gang aft a-gley.’ However much work and commitment you put into a project or career path, there is always something out there capable of knocking your feet from under you. Young people are so pressured these days to strive, work, plan, evaluate, and get obscenely laden with stress in the process.

I think the Confuscianist ethic of order, structure, ambition and control is given far too much weight now. Sometimes the very best things come from just going with the flow.