Life is good. Rarely easy. Often funny, outrageous, wonderful, thought-provoking. At times exasperating, doubt-inducing, desperately worrying and frightening. But deep down: life is good. Life lacks enough clear maps, timetables and simple instruction guides; it appears at times to deliberately mislead you and steer you down a few side paths until you hit the clear empty highway and can begin to motor. It introduces you to plenty of case studies, odd-ball characters and crazy schemes but it does provide books, rock ’n roll and one or two awesome HBO series. Oh and decent coffee if you choose carefully and allow the water to cool a little. Life is surely worth one or two hiccups in order to be exposed to the entire collection of Beatles masterpieces. Life is rarely explicit: where, after all is the fun in that? Life will introduce love and your head and heart will seek to explode. Life will take it away; yes, just like that. Life will create mind-boggling amounts of energy, focus and sheer joy and then bring you down to earth in stale sheets and aching limbs with the flu. Life will rain on your parade. The bowl of cherries will be ‘temporarily unavailable’. The central line will be down, again. Life will cause tears. Of joy and of heart-breaking worry. Life never promised to be easy but tearing open the packet, getting stuck in and working hard allows overall, on balance, considering all the various parameters and listening to all the subject matter experts and taking appropriate due diligence … life is good. Man, damn good.