People often claim they have "just missed out" on something, as if they were striving to attain a specific goal and were narrowly thwarted by the penalty shootout. The reality often turns out to be that they weren't even picked for the team.
Life frequently relegates us to the substututes' bench, where we have no opportunity to influence the game except by shouting, and feeling we could have done better, given half a chance. And more skilled team-mates. Or fewer skilled team-mates. End of analogy.
There are various things I'm glad I didn't experience, because they probably weren't all that much fun. As a young child I was old enough to escape tonsilitis and measles, and as an adult I was sufficiently senior to be vaccinated early for Covid. In my youth I only just missed National Service, having previously avoided two world wars. (Through no fault of my own except my date of birth.)
Long before I obtained gainful employment (ha ha), my life seemed proficient at staying out of trouble. Take the case of Danny the Red and the year of student protests in 1968, which affected many of the universities in Europe. The blissful exception being St Andrews, where the future king of England later followed in my footsteps, first as a student in my hall of residence and then as a graduate, as was his future queen. I'm surprised they could still find my footsteps three decades later.
Dany le Rouge's red hair and politics didn't prevent him from becoming president of the Green Party in the European Parliament. Red and Green and purple prose; he was a colourful character, who achieved the rare distinction of being expelled from France, the country of liberty and fraternity, as a revolutionary! A badge of honour equivalent to a Greek adding JBB to his qualifications ('Jailed By the British') or an Indian graduate's 'B.A. (Calcutta, Failed)' which is generally reckoned to be better than a Pass anywhere else.
My luck held out in other ways. I was the beneficiary of a student grant, whereas nowadays I would leave university owing 7 times the amount I paid for my first flat in central Edinburgh. How I wish I owned that flat now.
I fled the Middle East a few days before the first Gulf War began. (All right, I retired two years before, if you want to be literal, but fled sounded more adventurous.) I was spending the night on the east coast of Cyprus when an earthquake demolished my village house on the west coast. I rented in town from then on. I was either a lucky dog or a harbinger of doom.
I've rambled from the point, and it was generous of you to follow. The point being, sometimes just missing out on something is a boon, a positive advantage, when we look back with 20/21 vision. It often turns out that we've staved off something that was just no fun at all, without even being aware that we possessed a stave. What if Covid had come along before Edward Jenner created vaccination? Would you be reading this now, or burying your face in your hands?
Or do you do that anyway?
