“Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.”

I believe in working. Well most of the time I do. Which is actually just as well because I need to work for a living. In fact me and Alex both do and mostly we like it that way. I think needing to do something for your very survival can be good for the soul.  Like millions of others, we’ve worked to pay the bills, to eat, to educate us and our children, to holiday, to clothe us and to fill our homes with probably too much stuff that we don’t really need. And it’s big bonus time if we also happen to like our jobs. That makes you one of the lucky ones. Some people will need to earn to live and some will have less of a need to earn in order to live. Some people have a greater need to work than they have to earn. Everyone is different and that’s what makes life good. When I visited a temple on a school trip last month, our guide showed us a thousand little pots in the temple which are emptied and filled with water every night. This mundane and lengthy task is believed to help the person doing the job because it teaches patience, requires commitment and strengthens the character. The reason for my preoccupation with all of this is because recently I have been getting concerned at the pretence around the subject of money. Money, money, money… there I’ve said it!!! I am not a millionaire and I’m not going to pretend that I am. But ridiculously, there appears to be an increasing pressure today to do just that. I am not poor if poverty is measured by hunger, home, health, love, opportunity and education. But you can make me appear poor if you choose to measure it by something you know I don’t have. I am passionate about working hard and being rewarded for that, and I clearly will never merit a true marxist tag although in my more romantic moments I do imagine.. but that’s not who I am. I love the funny silly things in life. I love travel and good food and good company and daft pointless sparkly things as much as anyone. And I hate snobbery in all its deceptive forms. Reflecting on this, I have come to the conclusion that I clearly have too much time on my hands these days to be quite so preoccupied with the not very nice. I really do need to get back to work, and start earning those stupid sparkly things again.