Will’s World: Here’s to fate, fortune and counting blessings
© Richard Stanton Regular readers of this column will know that every year on 23 December, when we’ve finally got our daughters to bed, the present Mrs Evans and I stoke up the fire, open a bottle of wine and sit down together to watch the classic Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life.
And every year, without fail, I’m a blubbering and emotional mess when George and Mary Bailey give away their honeymoon money to save their friends from financial hardship as the Great Depression of the 1930s begins.
See also: The ultimate guide to farmer-made Christmas gifts
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In the unlikely event that you haven’t seen it, it’s the ultimate story of aspiration, sorrow, redemption and friendship. Being the hopeless romantic that I am, I adore everything about it.
Based, as it is, around the theme of life and death, and the way that acts of kindness and love can have huge consequences for other people and the life they’ll ultimately lead, it always leaves me reflecting on fate.
Friends like these
Do you believe in fate? That events are somehow meant to happen, or that couples or groups of people are destined to be a part of each other’s lives.
I think about it often. Last month, standing in the middle of a friend’s field in the Scottish Borders, the taste of sloe gin in my mouth as I waited to miss a few pheasants, I found myself contemplating the subject once again.
My memory turned to September 1999, when I pulled up at Harper Adams in my hideously uncool Renault Clio, and nervously began to unload my belongings into my new home.
I’d hardly been off the farm before, looked about 14 years old and, being painfully shy and unconfident, was extremely wary of who I’d meet in the coming days and weeks.
I needn’t have been, though. Over the next few hours, as they too arrived, I met the other lads who were on the same corridor as me in our halls of residence, and from that day forward we’ve been inseparable.
We survived the notorious Harper initiations together, shared more experiences and belly laughs over the years than I can even begin to count, gained far more tolerant wives than any of us deserve, and somehow ended up with an awful lot of rapidly growing children.
We have delighted in each other’s triumphs, cried on each other’s shoulders when tragedy has struck, and have generally been there for each other throughout the vagaries of life.
Written in the stars
What are the chances of that happening? That a bunch of lads with contrasting personalities, from different areas of the country, would apply to the same college in Shropshire, be randomly allocated rooms on the same corridor, and immediately become lifelong friends. Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?
Maybe it’s just due to our similar backgrounds, and the way that so many of us are brought up in farming communities, with values based around treating people as we’d like to be treated ourselves, as well as the “work hard, play hard” theory that’s so encouraged at places like Harper.
But I think it’s perhaps bigger than that. The older I get, the more convinced I am that some things really do happen for a reason.
Anyway, back to the present day and the movie in question.
As Clarence the angel says to George at the very end, when he’s reunited with his loved ones after being shown a terrifying glimpse of what the world would look like without him in it: “Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.”
I hope you get time to spend with yours this Christmas – it’s what this wonderful life is all about.