Written 17 Jan 2010, London
To be delivered 17 Jan 1996, Nottingham
You are in the first year of the sixth form, studying Maths, Further Maths, Physics, and Computing. You won’t get any cleverer, but you’ll become a lot wiser by the time you’re 30.
Your life will change forever on 18th September 2002, but you won’t realise how much for many years after that. I was about to suggest how to cope with that change and how you could deal with it sooner rather than later, but maybe that would be unhelpful. If you aren’t ready to face that change when it happens, then maybe waiting for the right time is all you can hope to do. Fair enough; that’s what I did. In fact, mostly I’m still progressing very cautiously.
OK, so we’re saying not to do anything different if you don’t want to. But please could you do a favour for me? Just tell mum how much I love her. Tell her sorry that it took her death for me to realise how much it would have meant for her to hear that. Most of the time, she’s strong enough not to need to be reassured verbally. I think she knew how important she was to me, but it wouldn’t have hurt to tell her.
You probably think that love will be a mystery that unfolds in the future as you grow older. It turns out that the heart of the matter is something you could be on top of already if you thought about it a little bit more.
Sorry to burden you with my own requests, but if I recall correctly, your thinking is really fairly clear. You know what you’re planning to do, and you’ll just go and do it. Everything seems safe enough and I don’t think there’s much help you really need right now.
Have fun!
Dan
