This week marks the 33rd year since I finished my Allied Dunbar sales-associate course at their training centre just outside Swindon. What a dramatic couple of weeks that was, and how proud I was to have “a proper job!” to make my mother proud. Maybe I was deceived, and I never really made it onto the stage in a “The Broad Concept” type of speech, telling them all how I done good. I mixed mostly with the losers. But losing teaches resilience, and I never trusted those super star salesmen. I got just one thing right – I stuck it for five years, learned the trade and left to become an independent financial adviser. I might have quoted the words of another Cheltenham lad, had I known it then, Adam Lindsay Gordon, on emigrating to South Australia,
And few my future lot will know,
And fewer still will care.
My hopes are gone, my time is spent,
I little heed their loss.