Just on the off chance that you think that the above picture is of Karen and I on our recent holiday in Cornwall, relaxing in the sunshine, I’m sorry to disappoint you, although the sea was that lovely turquoise colour and the sun shone most of the time, and we spent a lot of time at the beach, our deck chairs don’t look anything like this, and neither do Karen or I! I can imagine that this image will look like the perfect holiday for some of our regular readers and this would represent the worst holiday imaginable for others. There was a time when slimming clubs enrolled the greatest number of new members at the beginning of January, at a time when people had overindulged over Christmas and had just booked a holiday in the sun somewhere and had just decided that this was going to be the year that they would strut along the beach looking amazing in just their swimwear.
It seems to me that throughout history, human beings have been obsessed with perfection. If you read the opening verses of the book of Genesis in the Old Testament, you will read that God created the world and (in my words) everything was perfect. In the way that things often happen, once human beings started to dominate, our ancestors made a right mess of things and ever since Adam sunk his teeth into that apple, generations of people have been trying to rediscover perfection and I find myself thinking “what might the perfect life look like?” sitting outside our tent on the hill overlooking Widemouth Bay near Bude, came pretty close, with the freedom to do whatever we wanted to do when we wanted to do it. Life felt very close to perfection as we sat in the car park down at Widemouth Bay each evening, watching the sun set and surfers making the most of every last second in the water before darkness fell. It felt pretty good not having to read the string of e-mails, or the umpteen telephone calls and just be at peace.
The problem is that over centuries, people have looked in all the wrong places to find the perfect life, assuming that if the lottery machine picked out their numbers this week, making them multimillionaires then life would be perfect. Soon after I first started work, one of our regular customers was a lady called Viv Nicholson who had shot to fame in 1961 when her husband won £152,319 (roughly equal to £3.6million today) on the pools and she told the media that she was going to spend, spend, spend. It is perhaps unfair of me to comment, but my memories of her are not of a lady who was deliriously happy, I think it is fair to say that by the time I met her, the money had all gone, and life was quite challenging for her. Certainly, if you are struggling to get by an injection of capital can’t half help. But some of the huge amounts of money given away by lotteries, can cause as many problems as they solve.
Of course, body shape and size are issues that challenge a lot of us continually and it doesn’t help when some clown like me posts a picture like the one above. I am shocked at the medical procedures people splash out on to improve their body shape or appearance, we are constantly shown the perfect family, mum, dad a boy, a girl, a dog, and an immaculate house with every gadget imaginable. One kitchen supplier claims to deliver us from the shock of House-barrassment, the effects of having a kitchen that isn’t as good as the one in our friend’s house, shocking! What are they inferring? Throughout history, people have thought that they will find happiness in status, academic ability, wealth, possessions, appearance, even our post code.
Maybe our camping holiday in Cornwall is a good example of the perfect life, going to sleep when it was dark, getting up when we woke up, no telly, no newspapers, just pleasing ourselves and relaxing, maybe perfection has less to do with what we have, what we look like, the car we drive or the house we live in and far more to do with the people we are.