Getting to the Finish Line

The Line We Paint Ourselves

We all do it. We pick a spot somewhere off in the distance, paint a nice bold line across the track, and tell ourselves that once we cross it, everything will make sense. The job, the house, the pension, the title on the door… pick your poison. It’s a perfectly human thing to do, and I’m not here to sneer at it, because I’ve painted more of those lines than I care to count.

The trouble is that we paint them while standing still. We work out the distance, the pace, the effort required, and we forget that the track itself has a mind of its own. It floods. It moves. Somebody further up the chain decides it’s being resurfaced, or closed, or sold to a developer, and nobody thought to send you the memo. The finish line, it turns out, is rarely the hard part. It’s everything that happens between you and it, most of which you never saw coming.

I’m writing this from a cave in rural Spain, which, if you’d shown me the brochure at sixteen, I’d have assumed was a misprint. Nobody draws a finish line that ends in a hillside with no mains electricity. And yet here I am, sixty-six years in, with the kettle on the gas and a fairly clear view of every line I ever drew, the ones I crossed, the ones I walked away from, and the ones that were quietly rubbed out while I was still running towards them.

The Business Handed to a Boy

The first line I was offered, I didn’t even draw myself. I was sixteen, maybe seventeen, back in Hull, and I’d ended up working at a small insurance broker’s. The owner was losing his sight, slowly and cruelly, and he was looking for someone who could eventually take the whole thing off his hands. I wasn’t looking for a career so much as a wage, but I was prepared to work, and I did. Early starts, late finishes, the sort of graft that gets noticed when the person doing the noticing has fewer and fewer good hours left in the day.

What I noticed, in return, was how the money was actually made. Customers would come in for a straightforward renewal and leave with more cover than they’d walked in wanting, not because their lives had changed but because somebody had leaned on them until they agreed. Bigger policies, extras nobody needed, a gentle hint of disaster dropped into the conversation like a stone into a pond. It wasn’t illegal, as far as I could tell. It was just wrong, in that quiet, respectable, suit-and-tie way that a lot of wrong things manage to be.

Then came the offer. He told me I’d put the hours and the effort in, and that the business could be mine. At that age, it should have been the finish line to end all finish lines… a teenager handed a going concern, a desk, a future with a nameplate on it. I said no. I couldn’t have explained it properly at the time, and I’m not sure I’d have wanted to, but I knew I didn’t want to spend my working life persuading people to be more frightened than they needed to be, and then charging them for it. Some lines aren’t worth crossing, however close they are, and however kindly they’re offered.

A Degree I Didn’t Have, and a Newspaper I Did

Fast forward a decade or so and I was after a change. I wanted something with structure, purpose, and a uniform that meant something, so I set my sights on the civilian police. It felt like the obvious line to aim for. I’d grown up in a service family; I understood discipline, I understood shifts and chains of command and the peculiar humour that keeps people sane inside them. What I didn’t have was a degree, and at the time, rightly or wrongly, that seemed to be the ticket on the door. No ticket, no entry. Thank you for your interest.

It’s a strange feeling, being told you’re not qualified for something you know in your bones you could do. You don’t get angry so much as quietly deflated, like a tyre with a slow puncture. You keep driving, but everything feels a bit heavier than it should.

And then, at twenty-six, I opened a newspaper. Not a careers portal, not an algorithm that had been watching me for weeks, just an ordinary newspaper, and there it was… the Royal Air Force advertising for trainee RAF Police. I remember reading it twice. It ticked the boxes that mattered; it seemed to suit what I needed for my marriage and my family at the time, and nobody in the advert was asking to see a degree certificate. A new line had appeared on the track, and I went for it.

The Old Boy at Twenty-Six

Here’s a sentence I never expected to write: at twenty-six, I was technically an old man. Not in the world at large, obviously, but in a training intake where the average age sat somewhere between sixteen and eighteen, I was practically a pensioner. They had knees that didn’t complain, metabolisms like blast furnaces, and an energy that made me tired just watching it. I had a wife, responsibilities, and the creeping awareness that every run was costing me slightly more than it was costing them.

It wasn’t an easy journey, and I won’t pretend otherwise. There were days when it felt as though the younger lot were, deliberately or not, nudging me towards the exit. Some of it was banter, some of it was the casual cruelty of youth that doesn’t yet know it’s being cruel, and some of it, if I’m honest, was probably my own head filling in the gaps. When you’re the odd one out, you hear the whispers whether they’re there or not.

But they didn’t push me out. I stayed, I passed, and within a few years of active service I’d signed on for the full twenty-two. That, surely, was the finish line. Career sorted, pension in view, a life I genuinely loved… the moves, the people, the work, the sense of being part of something larger than myself. I’d crossed the line I’d been told I wasn’t qualified to reach, and for a while I let myself believe the race was run.

Six Months and Ten Thousand Others

I loved the life. My marriage didn’t. I’m not going to pick that apart here, partly because it isn’t only my story to tell and partly because some things are better left with the dignity of a closed door. What matters for this piece is that after seven and a bit years, I made a decision to buy myself out. It wasn’t a walk away so much as a step to one side. Under the terms and conditions as they stood at the time, I believed there was a window, six months or so, in which I could return. I wasn’t burning the bridge. I was just standing on the other bank for a while, waiting to see whether the water would settle.

When I eventually picked up the phone to come back, the bridge was still there. It just had a queue on it going the other way. Drawdown was underway, and the service that had so recently wanted me was letting more than ten thousand personnel go through redundancy. Nobody was rehiring an old boy who’d bought himself out when they were busy showing the door to people who’d never left. The rules I’d made my decision under hadn’t been broken, exactly. They’d simply been overtaken by events that were far bigger than me and entirely indifferent to my plans.

That’s the bit nobody puts on the motivational posters. You can do everything right, read the small print, time it carefully, and still find that the ground has been moved while you weren’t looking. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, with a family to think about and a CV that suddenly had a large, uniformed hole in the middle of it.

Pivot, Don’t Park

So I made decisions. Not grand, cinematic ones with a soundtrack swelling in the background, just the practical, slightly unglamorous choices you make when the plan has gone and the bills haven’t. I took what the RAF had given me, the discipline, the procedures, the instinct for when something in a room isn’t quite right, and I carried it into civilian life, where it eventually became a career in security management. It wasn’t the line I’d drawn. It was the line that was available, and I ran at it anyway. I’ve written before about pivoting, and I’ll keep writing about it, because it’s the single most useful thing I ever learned to do… and I learned it the expensive way.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe. The finish line isn’t a lie, but it is a sketch. It’s drawn on the day you draw it, with the information you have on that day, and the world is under no obligation to respect it. Bosses go blind. Entry requirements change. Marriages strain. Governments sign off defence reviews in rooms you’ll never see, and ten thousand people get the same letter on the same morning. None of that makes aiming pointless. It just means the aim was only ever the start of the conversation, never the end of it.

The people I admire most aren’t the ones who crossed every line they drew. They’re the ones who got knocked sideways, sat in the dirt for a bit, swore quietly, and then got up and looked around for the next stretch of track. Not giving up isn’t the same as never changing direction. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes not giving up means letting go of the line you were sure was yours and trusting that you’re still a runner, even without it.

I’d love to tie this up with a bow and tell you it all worked out exactly as it was meant to. I can’t, because I don’t think anything is meant to. What I can tell you is that I’m sixty-six, sitting in a cave on a Spanish hillside, and I still have lines painted on the track ahead of me. Some of them I’ll reach. Some will be moved before I get there. A few, I suspect, will turn out to have been the wrong lines altogether. That isn’t the failure of the plan. That’s the whole point of the thing. That’s what living actually is.

Until Next Time