Success or success - it's all relative

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.” Bob Dylan

I feel there has been a perfect storm of 'success' stories these last few days, some of them even associated with food, so I decided to write about it. And why the oxalis? Well they are all flowering at the moment as I discovered on my walk this morning. I tried to take a photo but, of course, my phone was dead. This picture is from an earlier walk. I have chosen oxalis as my pictorial representative of this post because they are a weed, and therefore a success. You can't be a weed without being a success. That's why your'e considered a weed. You're just too successful. But they are beautiful too.

It's not just the oxalis of course, weeds are coming out everywhere. I saw two men with large bags digging up something. I thought it might be some kind of gourmet mushroom so stopped to ask in case I could learn something about mushrooms. But no they were digging out onion weed - also a success. The man I talked to regarded it as a major project - as mine is with the bridal creeper. And I also noticed, that grass, which we actually would like to have in our garden is also successfully taking over flower beds everywhere. So is grass a weed too? Grass is beautiful. Onion weed is beautiful - it looks uncannily like snowdrops. You can eat it, oxalis too, but it does smell rather awful and it does take over. Very successfully.

Another recent example of a success story is all the stuff about the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. An aim was stated - to put a man on the moon in ten years, and achieved. Success. Well yes. It was indeed a major, major achievement but along the way there were failures, even loss of life, and some would question what it achieved anyway. Well I think there were major successes in that when things went wrong they just kept on trying. For a moment or two the world was united as we realised how small and insignificant the planet on which we lived truly was. And how beautiful. There were smaller successes too - women began to be accepted on an equal level to men - still working on that one, and of course there were technological successes that have doubtless led to more technological successes although I am not technically or scientifically minded enough to state exactly what they were - GPS, the internet, miniaturisation ....? But I am sure they were many.

And what of the astronauts? A success story such as that that must have produced an all-time high, and must have been difficult for them all in their later lives. Surely one never reaches such heights again - as with elite athletes, film stars, other major 'achievers'. So is that kind of success worth having? There would be the stress of holding on to that success, of doing yet more - breaking some new record, winning more awards, being recognised in more and more places, being paid more and more. And when it all almost inevitably disappears, do you spend the rest of your life resenting the reality of the afterlife of fame? Do you despair, turn to drink, drugs and other self-destroying behaviours?

A few days ago Rohan Dennis suddenly dropped out of Le Tour. He had been expected to do well in the time trial, and indeed overall. He basically just stopped cycling, and so far nobody seems to have been able to find out why, although he has previously made comments along the lines of "why am I doing this?" So is dropping out, giving it all away, a success or a failure? Should he be admired, pitied or scorned and despised? If indeed it was a kind of despair that forced him to quit, was it because he felt that he was not going to achieve true greatness and win the race, or even a stage, was he never going to be the next Lance Armstrong (without the drugs), or was it that he felt that the whole exercise of bicycle racing was a waste of time? If you try to achieve success at this level, in whatever field of endeavour, sacrifices will be made, most likely in your personal life and in your mental and physical well-being and there must be moments surely when one wonders whether it's all worthwhile.

Then I also read an article about a well-known Australian chef Jeremy Strode who one day threw himself under a train. He was successful, but the stress of it all, and the energy required, was just too much particularly for someone who was bipolar. Which leads to the chicken and egg argument - bipolar/stress - which causes the other? There was much reflection in the article about this particular profession - the hospitality industry - the long, long unfriendly hours, the potential abuse, the striving for perfection and Success with a capital S. So perhaps I did well not to pursue that particular path. Nothing surely is worth suicide?

“If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.” W.C. Fields

And finally - moving away from the human dimension, last night we watched Brian Cox telling us about the success of Earth and the failure of Mars. Almost twin planets. I actually learnt quite a lot - that Earth was initially much more inhospitable than Mars, but the fact that Mars was smaller, cooled more quickly and lost its magnetic field meant that the solar winds stripped it of its protective atmosphere, its water and possibly its life. Success and failure on a very grand scale, that basically was down to chance.

If you look for quotes about success almost all of them will be about how to achieve Success with a capital S, basically by never giving up, learning from mistakes and by hard work. And the modern world places a huge amount of value on Success. From a very early age we are driven to succeed in our future career, which will give us prestige and money and everything that money can buy. Obviously most of us are not going to achieve that kind of Success. Even those who seem to have the potential do not necessarily achieve it. I sometimes wonder what happened to those other girls at school who appeared, to my less than confident eyes, to have everything - brains, looks, niceness and athleticism. After all none of them went to university - one of the main steps to success in the modern world. Just two girls went to university in my year. One who was very brainy and went to Oxford. And me. And I was just a very average student who actually achieved pretty average results in the exams that mattered. I don't think anybody else tried. But. My parents, particularly my mother, were keen for us to lift ourselves out of the lower strata of society in which we lived - to achieve what my mother couldn't because of the circumstances of her family. And I must have had a hidden streak of determination to prove people wrong when they said I couldn't. I also had the nouse not to aim high but to find a more modestly recognised university. And I chose very, very well. That university (Keele) is now very highly ranked, and is top in England for student satisfaction - which is also an interesting measure of success is it not? And perhaps you could say that it is the most important measure of success. I won't say that satisfaction is the same as happiness, because that's also something that has become a somewhat stressful measure of success. These days we have to be happy. We want our children to be happy. And yes I do want that for my children and my grandchildren, but perhaps we shouldn't aim as high. Maybe we should just aim for contentment, just as I aimed for moderate success at a somewhat unacknowledged (very wrongfully to my mind) university. Contentment is not perfection but it's perfectly satisfactory.

In anyone's life there are probably just a few moments of supreme happiness - the birth of one's child, the realisation that the person you love, loves you too, one of those magical moments that nature can provide ... But they are all personal aren't they? They have nothing to do with fame or fortune. But then most of us cannot know fame or fortune. Maybe those supreme highs - walking on the moon, winning an Olympic medal, making some momentous scientific discovery really are worth all the disappointments and failures along the way.

Bob Dylan's words don't really say it all. They are a bit selfish. 'Doing what you want to do' does not necessarily take into account those around you. You could argue indeed that Donald Trump is doing what he wants to do and that is certainly not a desirable trait in a human being. But Dylan is sort of right in that success is getting through the day and being content. As long as it means that those with whom you are most closely connected are content too. And maybe you can't be content unless they are anyway.

Einstein is closer to the mark.

“Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.” Albert Einstein

And when it comes to food, as all things should, particularly when you theoretically are writing about food - then you should not be aiming for perfection. Leave that to the experimenters, the innovators, the creatives, those aiming for the heights. Instead just try to produce something healthy and tasty and yes, comforting. Tonight it's just fish cakes from some leftover potato gratin, salmon from a tin, that somebody else has tried to perfect, and a bottle of Kings of Kangaroo Ground Hilda May Chardonnay - which is pretty much perfect - well to my relatively uneducated eyes anyway. And a rather nice touch to this wine - it is named after the maker's grandmother who was a huge influence on his life.