What a couple of weeks, it all kicked off with a windsurfing session at Clacton, and ended up with the sun going down on Mauritius. Rodrigues may be a small island with both feet sitting in the past, but what a spot to re-enact those feelings of the “good old days”. This wasn’t just filling in time between two locations; it was a trip of true exploration.

I still pinch myself in the mornings just to ensure I’m dreaming or just missed my bus to work.  There’s so much to thank the Colchester Lathe Company for. Clocking out with overtime stamped on my time card, hitching home because they don’t run a bus outside of normal hours. At the time I thought the fatter pay packet from the grime and piecework was my reward, how wrong I was. It may have taken some years to realise, but appreciation was my true reward. I’m sure we can all look at our live from different perspectives.

It’s all to easily to look on the dark side, I had to see a psychiatrist once, talked through my life, good and bad, all she could say is I had a traumatic life. A boarding school I hated, loosing a best friend, too many injuries and the one they like to hang on to, and the reason I was talking to her in the first place, cancer.

She couldn’t understand, apart from wishing I could swap places with my young friend I wouldn’t have changed a thing. When it all adds up I couldn’t have dared to dream of such a lucky life, but I am not so sure that I would have appreciated it as much without those years at the Lathe Company.

Before you think that I have lost my mind and just waffling, there is a thread to this. I’ve been to Rodrigues before, but with each visit when I leave, it is with a bit of envy. At first it would be of their island and its surrounding turquoise waters, but the true beauty are the islanders themselves.

The whole population would leave a premier league football stadium looking empty, yet they follow our football as if it were their own. They know all about the outside world and all it’s trappings, but would prefer to live a life that our grandparents would call “the good old day”, where kids are polite and “Sunday best” is your clothing rather than the highlights from the TV soaps.

It really feels like going back in time, but I think it is they who appreciate what they have, while modern society craves what it doesn’t. I’m not about to throw the laptop out the window and become a hippy, just think a little bit that their culture could be better than ours.