By Anthony Roberts, director of Colchester Arts Centre

I’ve had more fulfilment and happiness in the second half of my life than I ever thought possible in the first.

But to arrive at the place in which I find myself now, there have been so many strokes of luck, so many knife-edge decisions, so many tiny events that could have taken my life in such a different direction.

I can’t help but think that rather than be rewarded for diligent stewardship of life’s challenges the fact is...I just got lucky.

Or maybe I just got unlucky for the first half of my life.

I so nearly missed the deadline for the job application at Colchester Arts Centre in 1991. No internet back in those days.

On deadline day I faxed my letter and CV through to the centre of business (I still don’t know where that is) and arranged for a taxi to collect it and deliver it to the arts centre.

I spent 15 minutes persuading a man who I later grew to know as John Hayes to accept the faxed document.

Eventually he did.

Thank you, John.

I so nearly missed the deadline on having children.

I fell in love with a woman who unbeknownst to both of us was about to enter early menopause.

We had our baby just in time.

Now I have a beautiful boy and a beautiful step-son.

Huge significant shifts on tiny moments or chance encounters. Parenthood. Step-dad. Thirty years at Colchester Arts Centre.

I so nearly this, I so nearly that. But I know I’m not unique here. That’s what life is like. It’s like that for everyone.

I don’t think I particularly engineered the happiness of adulthood any more than I particularly engineered the unhappiness of youth.

That’s just the way it works sometimes. It’s that damned persistence of the unforeseen.

Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae agrees with me at least. She had the same experience.

Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge concludes with her beautifully eloquent reflection.

“And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.”