As time goes by, I tend to make notes of things I find interesting, either on my portable telephone or in a small notebook. Sometimes I use them in a subsequent blog, sometimes I discard them, wondering why on earth I made a note in the first place. On 21st December 2024, we were watching a very silly film on the telly called Carry On – “ooh er missus” (one for the teenagers, there) – starring Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman and at one point the former said, “Dreams have an expiration date“. If I had been making tracks, this revelation would have stopped me in them. Because dreams do have an expiry/expiration date, don’t they?
That expiry date is surely determined by the passage of life, eventually leading to death. But, having done a Google search, I guess this is not a cut and dried situation. Some say dreams definitely do have an expiry date, others don’t. I guess it depends on the kind of dream you want to have.
For instance, I always dreamed of being a writer and I suppose you could say that dream came true. Perhaps, I should have been more specific and prefaced writer with, ‘a successful‘ but I suppose beggars can’t be choosers. Maybe there is a God after all (there isn’t) and he took me literally. “You want to be a writer, well okay then: you will be a writer!” Getting as many views in over a decade as a tabloid hack attracts on a single morning was not, perhaps, the success I envisaged. Lesson learned: be more specific.
Another dream was to take an RV or Campervan around some smaller Greek islands. In 1992, we saw people doing just that in Skopelos, popping up in quiet bays, sunbathing and swimming and then visiting the local tavernas at close of play. Technically, we could still do that, but physically it would be far more of a ‘challenge’. 33 years ago, it would have been a doddle. Today, I am not sure I could, or would even want to ‘rough it’. I ache in places I didn’t know I had places, every minor football injury from my somewhat less than stellar parks career has come back to haunt me. Only yesterday, I had an horrendous arthritic flare-up in my hand, which made even changing gears in my car a painful inconvenience. Worse, these aches and pains just seem to come out of nowhere. If I had arranged to play golf yesterday, I would have had to cry off. And as for my bad back – woe is me – acquired while playing football in my early twenties, that’s not going to get better, is it?
On tinternet, you find numerous dissenting voices, people who had a lifelong dream and eventually they pursued it and it came true. ‘Dreams don’t work unless we do,’ says one blogger, describing how in this instance they had a dream of living in a particular place and becoming a personal trainer and their dream came true. Okay, fine, I thought. But you did this when you were young and, critically, fit and affluent enough to do it. How many of us are not one or both of these things?
I do have some dreams that are still attainable. Finishing that second difficult book, visiting the Maldives, renting a big house with a pool high in the Tuscan hills, having a cab ride in a train going over Shap Summit or the Settle and Carlisle line, enjoying an intimate relationship with Natalie Imbruglia; all very attainable dreams, I am sure you would agree. And it’s true that, with the possible exception of the one involving Ms Imbruglia, these dreams could come true but one day, maybe someday soon, the dreams will die, as surely as I will.
The best unwanted advice I can give you is to do the things you want to do and visit the places you want to visit while you still can. As Carl Wilson and Jack Rieley wrote in their song Long Promised Road which appeared on the Beach Boys magnificent 1971 album Surf’s Up, ‘Hit hard at the battle that’s confronting me, yeah. Knock down all the roadblocks a-stumbling me. Throw off all the shackles that are binding me down.’ Then get out there and follow those dreams because, in my view, dreams do have an expiry date and they don’t all come true. Far from it.
