An eminent talent agent and manager, Professor Jonathan Shalit OBE, was asked how he kept his company successful over so many years in the ever-changing world of show business. I’m sure the reasons are many, but the one he advanced on this occasion was his loathing of a particular bit of stinking thinking. He said that if anyone in a meeting said anything along the lines of “The business isn’t what it was” or “Things aren’t like how they were”, he would bring the meeting to an end.
I loved this. What better way to stay relevant, stay positive, than to waste no time lamenting a past that may or may not have been any better in the first place. What’s the point? What actually is the point? Yet so many of us think of nothing else. Life was better then, the world was better then, I was better then, blah blah blah. No wonder so much political discourse seems to echo this.
I hate it but, having spoken to Jonathan, it’s dawned on me that my mindset is the opposite of his. That’s my problem. It’s one of the many reasons I’m a terrible golfer. I can’t put my bad shots behind me. And I don’t just mean my bad shots that day – I mean all my bad shots ever. A good many of them flash before me even as I’m executing my backswing. How can I ever manifest a positive outcome if I can’t imagine one in the first place? I swear that I can hear the bloody ball hitting the trees or plopping in the water between finishing my backswing and hitting the thing.
I’ve had enough of this madness. I’m having half a pint of what Prof Shalit’s been drinking. I’m going to change my ways.
But before I do, I went to pick my daughter up from Heathrow’s Terminal Three this week. There was nothing good about the experience. It was jam-packed. It was tatty. Chaotic. Ten quid for a coffee and a bottle of water. Twelve quid to park for barely half an hour, most of which time was spent hunting around for a ticket machine that wasn’t broken. Dreadful. And to think what it was like when it was refurbished in the early 90s. Magnificent, it was. All gone now. Those were the days.