Ambition and hard work

I have just watched the programme about Swansea market. How humbling!!
This program should set an example to all that if you want to make something of your life there really is no moral alternative to ambition and hard work.

I couldn't help but remember the years I was employed as a Civil Servant. I didn't have to go out each day and justify my existence; I didn't have to walk the streets drumming up business or trade to put food on the table and clothes on my children. I seem to have avoided the laws of the jungle yet still accept a modest pension for my relatively worthless trouble. That's not to say that what I did was without merit. Not at all; but I was protected from the day to day necessity of providing for myself and this promulgates the illusion that separates such as I was from the reality of life.

Featured on the program were traders whose dreams were wrecked by public indifference to their efforts and others who adjusted to market trends and changed their products or marketing. In this cauldron of market forces, subject to the laws of survival of the fittest, I wonder just how many people in the UK are subject, these days, to these pressures. Not many, I suspect and just as well. Not many would survive.
I left the Civil service after ten years to seek my fortune mongst the ranks of the self employed. I don't think I was particularly suited to the jungle but I feel I did alright and justified my existence without making too many ripples on the nation's surface calm.

I would just say, though, to those who believe that success will come to those who persevere, prepare yourself for disappointment. The vagaries of public taste can be cruel to those with talent and favourable to some priveleged few who tickle the fickle public
appetite for whimsy. C'est la vie!!