Disappointment

I haven't had huge amounts of disappointment in my life. If I told you some of them you'd laugh at how trivial they were. They might have been life-changing - failing a football trial for instance - but terribly unimportant in the scheme of things.

Now here's a ridiculous one. In about 1982, in the days when video recording was out of my price range and the internet wasn't a word, I had two small children and a busy college life training for the ministry. One Saturday evening Mrs T and the small children had gone off to visit grand-parents and I had finished my work. I was preparing to watch a TV programme of a gig by my favourite band of the seventies, Genesis.

Being somewhat guilty about this space I decided to hoover the house before settling down. I ran the hoover into the tele and one of the two items broke. Sadly not the hoover. No catch up TV or iplayer. No-one else had recorded it.

My disappointment lasted, on and off, nearly thirty years until just now when I realised that I could probably find that programme on YouTube. I could. I did. It was good.

Who knew thirty years of hurt was so easy to fix? It's not quite meeting with triumph and disaster and treating those two the same, but if something has gone wrong maybe in time we'll figure out a way to fix it that you couldn't possibly imagine. Cryogenics anyone?

The other lesson of course is that if you have something good coming up don't do anything to jeopardise it. Wait with a beer, not a hoover.