What was the hardest personal goal you’ve set for yourself?
Some goals arrive with certificates and letters after your name; others live quietly in the daily act of keeping faith with yourself — and the people you love.
Getting to Oxford was the hardest.
Achieving the A-level grades to sit the Oxbridge exam — then actually winning a place to Balliol College to read History — felt almost impossible at the time. I’d started my A-level year doing Economics, not History, and I was in the lower set, turning in essays that earned Cs and Ds. That I turned it around still surprises me.
Is staying married a personal goal?
I think it is. If you love each other enough, you can ride through the gloom. That, too, has required effort, patience, and a steady kind of faith. That and staying rooted to the same place while the children grew up – Lewes has been a blessing and idillic for raising kids and their making lasting friends.
The MA in Education was another long slog, as was an Open University MBA module — Creativity, Innovation and Change — the most fascinating and challenging academic experience I’ve had.
Some goals have been physical.
Getting my weight down and keeping it there, thanks to a mix of education and the Zoe Health App, has required daily awareness and discipline. I’ve also had my share of unfinished ambitions: despite my efforts, I never became the competitive sailor I once imagined. But in my youth I did learn to ski well — on and off piste — and to draw with confidence through years of life drawing and observation. I could have completed my Swim England Senior Coach certification in 2010, and am finally doing so in 2025/2026.
And then there’s the diary.
Keeping one for 17 years, from 1976 to the early 1990s, almost every day, might be the most enduring act of self-discipline I’ve ever managed. Living with someone, then marriage, nudged the habit aside — but when the children arrived, I found myself returning to journaling, recording life as it unfolded.
Fifty Years On
I’ve begun the Fifty Years On task of revisiting and publishing every day of my diaries – a significant undertaking that if followed through will take from 2026 to 2040, writing most days, and when not, playing catch up or working through several days at once. It began on 26th February 1975. I was the eponymous 13 1/4 years old. I then wrote up most days in 1976, became flakier in 1977, after which I appear to have written up most days for several years. At some point in the early 1980s I turned to hard back notebooks.
Is it all about keeping faith with who you are, one page at a time? If I remembered at all fifty years from now will it be as a diarist?
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