Have you ever wondered what might have happened if when you left your house you had turned left instead of right, taken a different route to work, taken the bus or the train instead of jumping in your car as you had done every day for as long as you can remember. Who might you have met? what might you have seen? how many ideas might you have had sitting there on the top of a double decker bus watching the world hustle by, instead of being focused on the car in front? Most people are far too busy to contemplate such things, they have a routine, a system, a way of doing things. It is drummed into you from childhood, by parents, teacher’s, employers, there is a way of doing things, a tried and tested method that leaves nothing, or at least as little as possible to chance. Keep it simple, keep it safe. Religious leaders will tell you how to live, the morals and disciplines you should live by to ensure your place by Gods side.
I had a friend once, a man drawn to introspection, he told me what he claims to be a true story, and I have no reason to doubt him. It was not a fantastical story, you have heard, I am sure similar tales, but what made this story special, what made it stick in my mind and spur my fertile imagination into overdrive was his conclusion.
My friend was having a tough time of it back then, down on his luck is the usual expression. He was philosophical looking back, acknowledged his part in his own downfall, but of course at the time the world had been against him, and destiny had him in its thrall, but was having an off day. His wife had left him for another man, it took a while for him to realise that this was the case, she was, when all was said and done, there when he woke in the morning and set off for work, and she was there with his young daughter when he returned home. Dinner would be in the oven, he would play with his daughter while the aromas filled the house, and after dinner, when the child was tucked up in her cot, they would watch whatever TV series was popular at the time. So, all was well with the world, routine was being observed, bills were being paid, life was, well life was life, all was as it should be. Except that it was not, something was missing, although at the time he could not put his finger on exactly what, and well you do not prod at a sore place, do you? you leave it alone and hope it heals by itself. It turned out to be his wife that was missing, oh she was there in body but not in spirit, her physical heart was in the room, next to him on the sofa, beating away at a healthy eighty beats to the minute, but the part of her heart that did not pump blood, but instead pumped love and emotion was elsewhere. The problem he said to me with routine, with rules, and with accepting that if you follow those rules then everything else jumps into line behind it, is that it is wrong. Life is not orderly, there is no such thing as destiny, it is chaos, you have no more control over what happens to your life when you leave the house in the morning than you do if you hit a patch of black ice doing ninety miles an hour down a hill with a hairpin bend at the bottom.
Her heart had left him, already living with another man, even as they sat on the sofa together watching the perfect lives of a plastic American family with beautiful hair and perfect teeth, living the dream. It would be but a brief time before she followed her heart, and taking his daughter with her, left him to contemplate a life that had not been part of their carefully.
drawn up plans during that first flush of love between them. Angry and devastated, lost without the most important thing in the world to him, his beloved daughter, he sought solace through the produce of a distillery somewhere in the highlands of Scotland, built a protective shell around himself, and anaesthetised his mind to protect what was left of his heart.
At his lowest ebb, alone in the city of London, homeless and penniless, he wandered into an employment agency offering temporary bar work and was offered a position for the weekend. It was a short train journey away, too far to walk, but as far as his ability to pay for a train ticket was concerned it might as well have been on the moon. Needs must as the saying goes, he jumped the barrier and hid in the toilet for the twenty-minute journey, lest a ticket collector should come along. His luck held firm right up until the moment he alighted from the train and found himself in a queue to have his non-existent ticket checked, and with no other way out available, he had to face the consequences of his actions. Instead of making up a story about losing his ticket during the journey, he came clean. My friend had become too tired and dispirited to invent a lie, a beaten man, so he told the truth and threw himself upon the mercy of this man he had never met, promising faithfully to return the next day and pay for the ticket. The ticket collector should by rights have sent him back whence he came or locked him in a room until the transport police arrived. Whether the man had a good heart, or just could not face the paperwork, my friend had no way of knowing. The romance in my soul likes to believe the former, but either way he was allowed through without recourse, and found his way to the public house where he could earn a few pounds, and at the very least feed himself for a few days.
That night my friend found a permanent job, a roof over his head and met a lady whose heart had not yet been claimed. Fast forward, and the lady became his wife, gave him two beautiful children, who now, having reached adult hood themselves will no doubt add to the family.
The point of the story, the conclusion he drew from the experience was this, a fresh chance, a marriage, two new lives, a family dynasty stretching out into the future came, not through careful planning, not by following well-structured rules, but by the chance encounter with a good-hearted ticket collector, a stranger. I related this story to another friend of mine over a few beers one night, one of my favourite people in fact, he was a man who had never left the sixties, either in heart or hairstyle. His reaction had been “wow man, that is just too far out,” and I remember thinking that in one hackneyed old phrase he managed to encapsulate my reaction perfectly. As I said before, it is not the story itself, the story is as old as humanity, man meets woman, falls in love lives happily ever after, it is the idea that our future, our carefully structured lives are vulnerable to the slightest variable, whether for good or bad. Had my friend turned left instead of right that morning, had he not walked into that specific employment agency, had the ticket collector made a different decision, his history, and the worlds history would have changed. Those two children would never have been born, one day they might turn into authors, artists, inventors, or politicians and change the world, who knows.
I had not heard from my friend for some time, until last night that is, incidentally his name is John, it seems such a normal, almost non-descript name for someone who albeit unwittingly was to have such a fundamental effect on the rest of my life. John was now a firm believer in getting out into the world and letting life happen to you. With the kids grown up he found life stifling, so he left everything behind, just to see what would happen.
I might not hear from him for months at a time, although I avidly follow his adventures on social media, with, I must add a tinge of envy, although I would never have his courage to just go out and do it.
My own life was stuck in something of a rut, I had achieved as much as I was going to achieve from my work having reached the limit of my decidedly mediocre ambition and had no idea how to get out, how to change. Hearing from John, a quick call to tell me he was enroute to London and would hopefully see me before he passed through, had led me to contemplation, which I found a not too happy place. Here was a man living life on the edge, never planning more than one idea ahead, never knowing what each day would bring, good or bad, and what did I have to look forward to in my well-ordered and minutely planned future. Ahead of me was a business meeting some two hundred miles north from London, a pointless exercise, it was nothing that could not be handled on-line, but my boss had old fashioned values, and believed in face-to-face communication. I tried to explain that nowadays you could still be face -to- face without having to be in the same room, without the tedious hours of travel and without adding to his company’s carbon footprint, but he was not to be moved on the subject, and so I was destined to spend six or more hours travelling for a one-hour meeting, where everything had been already decided anyway.
Normally I would have taken the car, a jaunt around the M25, almost two-hundred miles on the M1 and then the A46 to York, a journey I could do in my sleep. I could write a guidebook on each services en-route, the quality or lack thereof in the restaurants, even the cleaning rotas for the toilets, which it seems always need sanitising the moment I need to use them. I have experienced many awkward moments trying my best to relieve my bladder while a cleaner industriously scrubs the urinal next to mine, tutting about how long I am taking, and causing my personal plumbing system to refuse all my entreaties.
Hearing Johns voice was on reflection the cause of my change of plans, contemplating his story and the life mantra he took from it, I decided to be a rebel, throw life a curve ball, to hell with the car and the mindless hours of tedium on the motorway, I would fake a mechanical breakdown and take the train, relax for a few hours, read a novel. As things transpired, I would never get to read the novel, and in fact never make that meeting. Leaving the house that morning and instead of turning right to get into my car as was usual, I turned left and headed to the nearest bus stop, it was a decision that would change my future.
Part two next week.
© Gareth Mehigan 2026
