Everybody goes through a stage of moaning about life, how unfair it is, one day in the early 60s I had been married about 5 years and on this particular day (I was still driving tankers for Caltex) I had been allocated an old tanker to drive with no power steering and only vacuum brakes, noisy and slow and only a short trip to Colchester that involved no overtime and I was having a good old moan to myself about how life was so hard.
I pulled into the transport café at Marks Tey (this was before they built the bypass) for my usual fry up of eggs bacon, and fried bread and toast (no wonder truck drivers used to suffer from stomach ulcers) when a coach load of mentally handicapped children pulled into the car park for a stop on their way to a day’s outing to Clacton and as they got off the coach all grinning and laughing, I watched them for a while and then gave myself what you could call self flagellation and said to myself
“You whingeing bastard Eddie you have a lovely wife, 3wonderful children, buying your own home, a top job paying top money and have all of your marbles (that’s not what some people say but that’s life) and you have got the nerve to moan.”
And from then on I realized there are always people worse off than you so be happy with what you have got