And -- oh yeah, welcome to the rest of your life

The best laid schemes o’ mice and men
Gang aft agley
- R Burns

Did your life turn out in the manner you anticipated when you graduated from high school?

Neither did mine.

I’m not saying it turned out better, or worse, but it turned out different. Quite different. Truthfully, I’m uncertain how I, a callow 18-year-old, envisioned how I would be going through my days on the planet.

What I conjectured was, I would head off to university. I would meet somebody and fall in love and have rapturous sex with that person, and eventually we would get engaged and married and maybe have 2.5 children and I would be in some profession or other and we would have a lovely home and a nice car and everybody would live happily ever after.

Actually, at my graduation ball I did meet a very special someone who was quite lovely and we were to become steadies for two years and we did all that aforementioned carnal stuff (back in the days when there was a lot of risk involved, but what the hell, we were lucky in that regard.)

Anyway, I did go to university and did get into a few careers, all of which I’ve enjoyed to greater or lesser extents, and I got married in a sort of serial manner (which I hadn’t anticipated), and otherwise have dealt with life with all its ups and downs. Some of the downs have been excruciating and I’m glad I wasn’t forewarned about how nasty is some of the shit that happens to us all. But, some of the ups have been wonderful and blissful and gave me the strength to carry on. Also, and this was confusing at the time, some of the downs were actually thoroughly disguised ups and manifested themselves as such after a passage of time.

Oh, and I didn't have those 2.5 kids. I kind of regret that.

This graduation stuff is manifesting itself mainly because it is so-called ‘grad-week’ in these parts, and kids are on the verge of leaving their cosseted lives. I envy them not. If I had to go through that stuff again, I think I’d take up skydiving without a chute.

If I were ever asked to give a message to a graduating class, I think it might go like this:

"Hey, kids. Expect the unexpected and you’ll never be disappointed. And, girls, keep your knees together if you’re wearing a skirt and drinking in an Italian bar.

"There’s nothing much more you need to know other than it’s grad night and there is absolutely no cure for a hangover other than time and lots of water. The rest is mythology."