Other people accept the challenge to pour water over their heads. I set myself a challenge to post a new photograph on my Facebook page every day for a year.
On Tuesday, I set out with my camera to take a picture of youngsters on their way back to school at the end of the summer holidays.
Then I realised if I did, I could end up being arrested and the police might find my Worzel Gummidge DVD collection: Lardy Cake and a character who has different heads for different moods? Just what sort of drugs was The Crowman dealing?
So I didn’t take a photograph of the crowds of slump-shouldered kids on their grumpy way to another term after an endless summer of idleness.
Ah yes, I remember it well.
School was not a particularly happy time for me. At the age of 12, I transferred from St Michael’s College in Leeds to De La Salle in Salford.
You try going straight into the second year with a Yorkshire accent. The only beneficial part of the deal was that I went past the Theatre of Dreams at Old Trafford everyday on my way home, which was how I became a dyed-in-the-wool Red.
School gave me bad dreams. I would wake up in a cold sweat, worried that I hadn’t done my homework, before realising I’d left school and no longer had that penance to endure.
The same thing happened as a journalist. I still have bad dreams about failing to write the lead story for the Examiner by deadline time, because I’ve been drinking in The Albert. Then I wake up and realise I’m retired.
I’m a great believer in working to deadlines, although the pressures in semi-retirement are not as intense. Or are they? I still have this column to produce and have started writing a new book and I have the challenge of coming up with a new photograph every day for Facebook. Without getting arrested.
