The decision that changed my life

I’d like to take you on a little trip back in time. The date is 23^rd December 2003. I didn’t realise it until a couple of weeks ago, but up until this particular day, I’d been playing ‘victim’ in my own life. Not for the 5 years, I thought it had been, but for 12!

Take a look at this photo. As you can see, it’s cold. It’s the day before Christmas Eve and me and my son James are working on this trailer.

I’d recently bought it to add to the fairground equipment I already had. It had been a horsebox and I’d bought it to convert it to a games stall.

We rubbed all the body down, cut two openings on one side, to which we added shutters that we could lift up to open the stall. Inside, we panelled it out, added electricity points and painted it up.

We took off the back door which would drop down so that they could walk a horse into it and added two doors to get in and out. And I made and sign-wrote a sign that attached to the roof of the trailer.

And it was on that very day, that whilst rubbing down the front of this trailer, wondering what I was doing outside in the snowy cold (you can just see the start of the snow on the bonnet of my car in the bottom left-hand corner and on the drawbar of the trailer), that a glaring realisation came to me.

It was a couple of hours after this photo had been taken. I was sanding down the fibreglass, my hands were freezing cold and I’m swearing to myself.

“What the f*ck am I doing out here? I must be mad. My life shouldn’t be like this. It wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for that bastard.”

It was at that moment that I realised.

Back in 1990, I had a business, putting amusement arcade machines and video games into pubs, clubs and shops from Weymouth in Dorset along the coast as far as Paignton in Devon. 

My son Henry was born in December of 1990 and due to the actions of one person, with me being more engrossed in my new son than keeping my eye on things, my business collapsed within a period of a month.

What happened shall remain private but I will say that I blamed what happened on one particular person – one who I trusted with my life.

It wasn’t until I returned to work a month later that it dawned on me what had gone on in the interim and the problems it caused.

The upshot was that we lost everything. I could have gone bankrupt, but after speaking with my Dad, I made the decision to sell everything I needed to sell in order to avoid it. And that’s what I did.

Over the next year, to keep the food coming in, I started market trading. And the stock I sold? My beloved record collection was my starting stock. It’s just as well it was large. Over that next year, it kept money coming in, but we ended up in the position where, by February 1992, we were about to be made homeless.

I won’t give you the details of the next few years as they were painful and I don’t really want to go over them in detail.

Over the next years, as a family, we worked and started to get back on our feet. And when I say we, that’s exactly what I mean. By 2003, we had a business, attending fetes, shows, and fairs with fairground equipment that we’d started to acquire over the previous two or three years.

By the time this photo was taken, my sons James and Henry were 17 and 13 and they’d both been fully involved in helping us get our business open and continuing the project, as was my wife, Carol.

But on that day, with me berating myself about our plight being caused by this one person, I realised for the first time, that my ranting and raving wasn’t hurting him. I realised that for all the bitterness I harboured, it had absolutely no effect on him at all.

I remember thinking to myself that during all this time when I was eating myself up with anger, and the nights I was awake running and re-running the events through my mind, that he was oblivious to it and probably slept quite comfortably and most likely, never gave his actions a second thought.

I realised that day that whilst he may well have been the cause of the problem, that was all he was.

His actions may have precipitated the events that brought us into the position we’d found ourselves, but after that, everything that happened from that moment, was down to me.

And even though I worked every hour I could to dig us out of the hole, and now we were starting to get back into a more comfortable position again, deep down in my heart, I was still playing the victim.

I realised that my, ‘woe is me’ attitude had been holding us back for all these years. Everything I’d done, each thought I'd had, although aimed at rebuilding our lives had also been hindering every step of the way because of my ‘victim’ mentality.

I don’t think there was a day during those years when I hadn’t sworn at or blamed this other individual for the situation I was in. My anger was deep down. My stomach seemed to be continually knotted, sleep was something I rarely had. At night if I dreamed it always revolved about our situation.

I couldn’t see that inch by inch we were clawing our way back. All I could see was that we’d had to go to car boot sales to buy my kids presents on their Birthdays and Christmases during those first few years. I couldn’t forget that for 18 months, my wife and I had pretty much survived on beans on toast in order for us to be able to feed the boys properly.

All the time I was doing this, it was eating away at my soul and my self-esteem. And I couldn’t get out of my head that even on the day that my Dad died in 1994, I didn’t have enough money to put petrol in my car to get from Weymouth to Farnborough and that I’d had to go to my next-door neighbour and borrow £10 to get petrol to go.

And so all this anger and hatred inside me was affecting me day after day.

But at that moment, when I had this startling discovery, everything...and I mean everything changed.

At that moment, I realised that the biggest problem I had wasn’t all that had gone on before, but my attitude toward it.

What had happened had happened. But from that moment, everything I did was down to me. How I thought about it was down to me.

The realisation that I was hurting nobody other than myself was like a thunderbolt hitting me.

I then spent the next 20 minutes or so berating myself for being such a fool. Once again, I was beating myself up.

And then, with the snow falling, and my freezing cold hands holding the drill, I made, probably the most important decision I’d ever made.

I looked down at the snow-covered floor, dragged one foot along it until it made a line and decided that the other side of the line was the past – that’s where my anger, hatred and pain was. I’d stepped over it, looked down and I wasn’t going back over it anymore.

And from that day on, I stopped being angry. I stopped thinking about him and what he’d done. And started to move forward.

And over the next few years, my stupor lifted, my business improved and for the first time since 1990, I started to feel good about myself.

I started to see what I’d been through over those previous years in a different light. From feeling bad about what had happened to us, I started to see how, from virtually nothing, we’d started again and had got into the position where we’d rebuilt.

I started to feel proud of the things I’d done to move on. I started to see the accomplishments of the past few years.

It was the start of me moving on, in my business, in my life and most importantly, in my heart.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a fairy story. Not everything went right. I didn’t become a millionaire or even close.

But what I did become, was proud of who I’d become. Proud of the challenges I'd overcome, the ones that at the time, I didn’t see as successes, just failures. But as I often say these days, your strength comes from learning from your failures.

I haven’t come through it all unscathed. Those days of buying my kids presents from Car Boot Sales has never left me. I still feel that as much as I did back then. Christmas never comes without me remembering those years. Sadly, I’ve never been able to shake those memories off.

However, looking back, I know that we did what was needed and we always made to try to make them happy times for the boys.

And as I look back to that day, I think of it as my ‘flick of the switch moment.’ The day I got my self-respect back. The day I kicked my stinkin’ thinkin’ out. The day I realised that my attitude, good or bad, was down to me.

It was the day I finally got it. The day I realised that whatever happened in my life, good or bad, my attitude was down to me and no-one else. No matter what happened in the world, it was up to me how I reacted.

I had lost everything I’d worked for in my life. I’d spent years blaming someone for everything bad that had happened after that. And finally, I’d learned the lesson that my attitude controlled how I reacted.  And I was the only person who could control my attitude. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not perfect. There are still times when my attitude is bad, but I realise quickly and set about changing it.

But when I look back, the day before Christmas Eve, 2003, was the day my life turned around. It was the day I grew up and became a man.

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