part0023

When you were a bright-eyed young schoolchild, did you ever say that when you grew up you wanted to be a popular singer, or a top racing driver, or a brain surgeon, or an admiral of the fleet? And why not? What’s wrong with having a dream, aspirations - something you hope to work towards? Surely being inspired and trying to make your dreams come true is something that we would wish for everyone. Yes indeed. But then our dreams become tempered by the long experience of many years of trying, hopefully having some success and surely also some disappointments. Such is life – this is the experience that nearly all of us are familiar with. But the delusions of grandeur I am thinking of in this chapter are not those of the naive and beautifully innocent schoolchild. No sir. Rather, they are those of the adult who, shall we say, is keen to ‘accentuate the positive’ (as Bing Crosby used to say) and perhaps to accentuate it rather too much.

I very much like going to the Greek Islands for holidays. If you will excuse a digression, the Greek Islands are a rather splendid place to vacation. Corfu is a particularly lovely island – the ‘Garden of the Gods’ as Gerald Durrell named it; and in fact there is a beautiful garden in Corfu town that contains a bronze relief of Gerry (and his brother Larry, also very much a man of letters).