Things sort of just happen, don't they? Like becoming a wedding photographer. I mean, I always wanted to be a photographer, but weddings? I'd never have thought it. I had grand ideas about working for the free press and appearing in The Guardian, National Geographic, LIFE magazine, the World Press Photo competition – even gaining membership to Magnum like all of my heroes.

But something was missing – entrepreneurial gumption, confidence or perhaps faith as I look back and think of 20-year-old me leaving art college. Back then I didn't believe the stories that you can literally do anything you want if your heart is in it and you set your mind to it. And so, for many years I followed the breadcrumbs life leaves us. One of those crumbs just so happened to be a mate asking if I "did weddings". It's a fair way to operate I suppose, if I were a hunter-gatherer I'd follow the nuts, the berries and the beasts would I not? But lately, I've started to realise we can and should be proactive and 'get upstream' (as ad man Dave Trott once said) and write our own destinies. It's time to stop hunting and gathering I thought and start farming – but at 51, it might be a little too late to set up my photojournalist smallholding.

Thankfully things sort of just happen, don't they?

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