All through your life people will offer you advice. Some will be asked for and some unwanted. Some will be good and some will be unbelievably terrible and often times catastrophic if followed. But at the end of the day, we choose the paths we take throughout our lifetime. I’ve cocked up many times and have no one to blame but myself. However not all the advice I refused to listen to had life changing effects. Here are some of my more memorable / funny ones.

• “Will you slow down, this is not a race car and you’re only learning.” This was said by my Dad approximately 5 minutes before I crashed his Massey Ferguson tractor into a concrete post which was the only thing stopping it falling down a steepish embankment. We had a long slow walk back to the house to get the digger to rescue it with. There were a lot of apologies on my part and a lot of silence on my Dad’s which meant he was less than pleased.
• “You’re going to end up getting hurt” – Again said by my Dad. When we were younger my sister and I used to share a room which had two single beds. One night when there was a strong possibility I was pretending to be Dracula or some other mythical creature with fangs, I can’t quite remember, I placed two straws in my mouth and decided to hop back and forth between the two beds. I was going great guns and having the time of my life until I fell against the bed and jammed the top of the straws into the roof of my mouth. I ended up with my head hanging over the side of the bath spitting blood and my Dad probably saying “I told you so.”
• “Don’t play with that, you’ll break it.” I’m not 100% sure if this is what my Sister said or not, but it was probably something along those lines, and it was in reference to the Sindy horse she received from Santa. I of course did not listen and proceeded to gallop said Sindy horse all over the house by holding onto it’s tail. Tail and horse seperated and I hid behind the freezer hoping no one would find out…or me for that matter me. There is another vicious rumour I fed her pippa dolls to the dog, but hey innocent until proven guilty!
• “Pull the brakes slowly, they are not working to well” – Said  my friends father as I whizzed down the hill past his house on her bike. Of course I panicked, jammed on the brakes and flew Superwoman style over the handlebars putting my two front teeth through my bottom lip.
• “Never fall in love with a Scottish Dude” – It took me 3 failed attempts to realise the wisdom behind my friends words. What can I say, I’m a sucker for the accent!
• “You really do need to study for your exams. Stop looking at me like that, I’m serious, you really do, I wish I had listened to the person who told me” – Oh the arrogance of youth. I didn’t study very hard despite hearing this sentence repeatedly from various sources. I failed most of my exams and had to go back the following year and do them all again. See I wasn’t lying when I said I was not the brightest pixie in the forest :) Many times I have passed on the knowledge in this sentence to others who are sitting exams only to receive the same look that I probably gave. Emphatic pleas and hand gestures follow, usually to no avail.

I’m sure there were many more pearls of wisdom and nuggets of knowledge passed along to me, but being old and not having a very good memory, I cannot recall them at present.

If only I’d seen this 20 or so years ago:

Before you act, listen. Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try.
— Ernest Hemingway