14,974 Days

Tomorrow marks the end of my 41st year on the planet. This is a huge surprise to me.

Not the fact that it's my birthday, as I've noticed they seem to happen around the same time every year and hence this time I was ready for it.

No, the thing that surprises me about this particular birthday is the fact that I've managed to accrue 41 of them.

In my twenties I was always genuinely of the belief that I would be boxed up and slowly reverting to my constituent parts before I was 30, based on my adrenaline addiction and a quite alarmingly under developed sense of self-preservation.Yet here I am. I survived 50mph rides on car roofs. I survived emulating my teenage hero Carl Fogarty. I survived some quite alarming parties. I even survived some pretty scary girlfriends' ex's.*

In my thirties I was far too busy climbing corporate ladders and generally having a high old time jetting around Europe persuading people to see things my way to notice my singular failure to be Pushing Up The Daisies. A friend took a good go at Throwing a Six on his motorbike and I sold mine as a consequence. It was replaced by mountains and I survived numerous miscalculations relating to both my climbing abilities and navigational skills.

So here I stand in my Forties. I'm glad that I was as wrong about my own judgement day as Harold Camping was about everybody else's because I've been having an absolute blast. The last year has been full of highs and lows, but right now I see the future as being somewhere I am very much looking forward to visiting.

NDC

* - If at some point in the future The Boy Wonder is reading this post, none of the aforementioned tales are true. They have all been made up for effect. You should not, under any circumstances, do any of these things. They are bad. 
Love, Dad.