Those were the words golfer Rory McIroy said to his four-year-old daughter Poppy after he finally won the US Masters golf tournament last week: “Never, ever, give up on your dreams.” It was a message, he added, not just for his daughter but “also for every little boy or girl in the world who has a dream.” He went on: “I wanted it to mean something more than me just winning a golf tournament. I wanted it to represent something more and be inspirational; if you have a dream, never give up on it and work hard. Overcome obstacles. Keep coming back. That is what I wanted the lesson to be.” It may have been some grit, but I definitely felt a few tears in my eyes when I read that.
I love his clarification, that “if you have a dream, never give up on it and work hard.” Because that is what I try to tell every young person I meet, and especially my own children. It holds true that I want my own children to do better in life, in every aspect of it, and not just professionally, than I did.
There was undoubtedly a temptation to read McIlroy’s quote and then resume wallowing in a pool of self-pity. My little dream of being a professional writer faded and died before I even left school, buried by a lack of inspirational figures in my life and the need to help put bread on the table. For many years, I did not dream at all. Instead, hedonism, or a version of it, took over. I prioritised what I saw as pleasure and muddled through the rest. At least I thought I did, but somewhere, deep in the recesses of my mind, the light never quite went out, the dream of writing for a living may have crashed and burned, but I could still be a writer.
It is not, I assure you, to say that I am not not good at anything. That is a simple fact. But I am not bad at everything. I was the Jack of many trades, not all. I could do most things to an acceptable level but I never found anything that I could honestly claim as being my speciality, the one spark that could lead me to a dream and then help me make it come true.
I learned early on that for working class kids of my vintage were not destined for the stars. We were collateral, fodder for employers, labour. I stepped into a dead end job and stayed there all my working life. Yet, in my small way, that was my achievement. Scrambling out of childhood poverty, aimless, directionless, without inspiration and leadership, lacking in educational qualifications, bereft of practical skills, some of which is still there today, I made it until, well, near the end of life, or perhaps I should nearer the end of life.
And in terms of my writing, I never, ever gave up. 6233 blogs since July 2014 I hope confirms that story. While my readership plateaued years ago and has slowly started to decline, I still get up every day, committed to writing the best piece I can. It gets me out of bed in the morning, specifically it gets me out of bed earlier every morning because I don’t want to waste time.
I am not going to ‘make it’ as a writer or blogger. I know that. The tiniest, still deluded, part of me still wonders if the future of my writing is, as you might say, unwritten but there is no dream, like the one McIlroy speaks about. Those are, rightly, the dreams of children.
I know why I keep going. It’s because I love it. I love the magic of finding a word I know I have never used before. I love that moment when an idea flickers into life and somehow demands I write it down. For a moment in time, my senses are, as Andy Partridge once so aptly put it, working overtime, but in a nice way. Some days, the magic – and I do feel it’s a kind of magic – isn’t there and I don’t really know why. It’s like my depression. Some days it’s bad, other days it’s not so bad and I never know which black dog will turn up.
My dreams, the conscious ones, are these days for my children. I am not pushy and overambitious and I want them to live the best lives they can possibly live, to be the best versions of themselves. And in so doing, I am still trying to do the same. The best dad I can be, the best partner (I hate the word husband, sorry to my partner), the best writer and, in general, the best person I can be.
I am not, as Elton John and Bernie Taupin put it, still standing better than I ever did. But I am still standing after all this time and I am still writing, I hope for a world that one day will find out what it has been missing. (Not really.)
“Overcome obstacles. Keep coming back.” Yeah, that. Although actually, I never went away.
