I’ve never had a life plan, and I’m still not decided on what I want to do for a living. During my working life, I’ve followed so many different paths even those who know me well are confused. I am too, so much so that I stopped thinking about it long ago.

Actually, I never DID think about it until I reached middle age, and by then I realised that it didn’t matter that I didn’t have a planned career path, so I put it out of my mind straight away.

The only times it was a problem for me was when I have had to explain what I do; I’ve learned that people like boxes to put you in and labels to stick on you. MY box has always been so soggy that it wouldn’t safely contain anything, and the label, if I had one, would be a paragraph long.

Fast forward to school leavers today. Worrying about what do at such an early age seems to me to be tragic. At that age, the only worry should be what to start with; there are so many possibilities and so much to do.

I’m not knocking education, which I loved once I found out how to use it, and it’s been a life-long pursuit ever since. I’m saying that life is about growing and it’s impossible to say in advance how you’ll grow and in which direction.

You can plan all you want, but stick to the plan too slavishly and you’ll miss opportunities and become a drone or a slave. Understand instead that you have a plan, sort of, and that you’ll get back to it when you’ve done what you are doing now.

For me, I knew I’d be a writer from an early age. I knew it but I didn’t believe it until I’d proved it to myself. So, I didn’t know how I’d get there but I knew roughly where I was going. It happened organically, I suppose you could say.