The 50 List – A Father’s Heartfelt Message to his Daughter: Anything Is Possible. Nigel Holland

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      Now I’m up and running with this thing, there’s no backing out. No, I know I’m not exactly running yet – my plan is so far little more than a sketched-out idea – but having come up with it, I realize that committing to all these challenges is beginning to feel more and more like a challenge in itself. It’s one thing telling yourself you’re going to be able to achieve all of them, but quite another when you tell everyone else you are as well. Another still when the person you most want to do it for is one of the people dearest to you in the world.

      As it turns out, I have been somewhat beaten off the blocks anyway, in terms of challenges, because only two weeks after formulating the plan, and my subsequent optimistic conversation with Ellie, I had another one lobbed into my lap. And it was a big one. A particularly big one for a man of my age. After 13 happy years working as a web developer, I was made redundant from my job.

      Sitting in the room that was once my study but has now been re-christened my ‘office’, in recognition of this new and exciting life stage, I think of Tommy Cooper and I smile. ‘Just like that’ – wasn’t that his tag line? I was made redundant, just like that. At least that’s the way it feels to me, though perhaps I should have seen it coming. Yet at the same time, I can’t stop thinking about the timing of everything. Perhaps fate’s played a part in all this happening when it has, because now nothing stands in the way of my doing what I’ve set out to do. I am all out of excuses. I have time on my hands. I also have a new item to add to my list of challenges: ‘Make my business work.’ Which is handy, because the zero gravity flight that it has now taken the place of was way too expensive to even begin to contemplate, and even more so for a guy with a family and a mortgage, but – crucially, and suddenly – without a job.

      But it was definitely a job I’m going to miss. Though in recent years, after my firm was taken over by an American company, morale was low, stress was high and business was a bit shaky, the timing of the redundancy, in one sense, couldn’t have been worse. During the last few months I was working for a really great manager, and though mostly from home – which was isolating, as I felt cut off from the office gossip – I felt energized about work in a way I hadn’t in a long time, and I’m sad that it’s all come to an end.

      There was also the big question to face: how on earth would I pay the mortgage? But, though the simple option would be to take my skills and go and find another job with them, I had, and still have, a nagging sense that I should be taking the plunge and going it alone. Now or never. And I’m definitely less keen on never.

      Which leaves me with now – do or die. Which is exciting yet scary.

      So sending off my entry form for the Silverstone half marathon seems a little less daunting as a consequence. Though on the one hand it feels like one of the most difficult of all the challenges – 13 miles, and in a wheelchair: I am going to need to train and then some – when I compare it to the career cliff face I’ve just been forced to jump from (hoping to fly, obviously, rather than fall flat on my face) it feels suddenly more in the realms of the ‘actually achievable’: a solid thing, something I have control over.

      As I sit at my desk filling in the online application form, I get a picture in my head of my beloved parents. Sadly, I don’t have many pictures of them together. I have old, individual ones, taken with primitive cameras, black, white and sepia, and fluffy-edged with age. But nothing recent. Not many that show how much they loved one another. If I could change one thing in my life it would be that they could be here to see me do this. You never lose that feeling, I think, whatever your age.

      * * *

      According to family folklore, which is generally the most dubious kind, I always liked making an entrance. There must be some truth in it, though, because the story goes that when I first looked like arriving, on 8 December 1962, my mother was busy serving dinner to no fewer than 12 guests.

      

To my perhaps unimaginative male eye, this seems quite a daring thing to be doing at any time, but particularly when you are 40 weeks pregnant. What became of the dinner guests and their dinners I don’t know. All I do know is that I appeared several hours later, making landfall at Shrub Hill Hospital in Worcester, which was where my father had hastily relocated us. It’s also said – more family folklore, this time probably 100 per cent reliable – that I was encouraged on my way by the irresistible smell of roast beef.

      I was the third of three boys (which perhaps explains my mother’s cool head in the face of a dozen hungry dinner guests), my brothers Mark and Gary then being six and four respectively. But I didn’t keep my privileged position for very long. No sooner had I turned two than my world was disrupted – by the arrival of my baby sister, Nicola.

      Nikki’s arrival caused disruption in other ways as well. Unplanned, she came under the banner of ‘unexpected gifts from heaven’, but for me and my brothers she was anything but. We had wanted a dog. We had been promised a dog. Well, if not exactly promised, certainly given to believe that having a dog was not entirely out of the question. So for the duration of the pregnancy, we were miffed (though in my case, possibly still hopeful she might turn out to be a dog) and according to my mother, we spent the first six months of her life demanding that she be called Rover.

      ‘Just as well you were a girl,’ I recall my mother telling her later, ‘or that might actually have turned out to be your name.’

      The house the family lived in when I was born was in Britannia Square in Worcester. I have only a few memories of my time there. The house stood very tall, with three storeys, and was painted bright white. In my mind’s eye, it was very grand looking, our family residence, though as a small child I naturally had a small child’s perspective, so perhaps it wasn’t quite as grand as it seemed.

      Either way, it was home, and it was a happy home as well. Though my memories of it are no more than snapshots, I recall a wind-up mouse, which I wound and launched accidentally into my potty – the potty into which I’d just peed. I also have a clear early memory of my dad stepping out onto the roof of the house to sort out some tiling that had come loose. He was a jack of all trades, Dad – a builder, decorator and, at that time, a bus driver, and I can still recall how incredible it felt to look up and see him, high above my head, fixing the roof.

      

But then everything my dad did seemed incredible to me. I remember walking down the road with my mum, brothers and baby sister, and how we watched as a double-decker bus drove past us into the depot. Minutes later we had followed it – Mum had to deliver Dad’s packed lunch to him – and I recall how thrilling it was to see my father climbing down from the cab of that very bus.

      We didn’t stay in Worcester for long. According to another piece of family folklore, my dad could drive anything – cars and buses, coaches and trucks, huge articulated lorries. If it had wheels and an engine, he was fine with it. As a result, within a couple of years of my sister’s birth, Dad had found a new job. A better-paid one – which was key, given that he had a young and growing family – as a driver for BEA at Heathrow Airport.

      We moved into a big sprawling semi in Hayes and Harlington, which was obviously convenient for Dad’s work at the nearby airport, but was also elderly and in need of tarting up. Which Dad of course did. Once again I have an enormous sense of pride in my father; he really did seem able to turn his hand to anything. Replacing windows, making furniture, painting walls, creosoting fences: there never seemed to be a day when he wasn’t busy doing something. In the meantime, we kids played in the garden. This had an Anderson shelter, a relic of the Second World War, which, though it had long since been filled СКАЧАТЬ