My friends are starting to turn 30.  As scary as that is for my parents and how confused it seems to make them, it brings up a simple point-how do you give them an incredible wine gift from their bith year, if the year they were born happens to suck for wine?

As an example, 1982 was absolutely horrundous in both Napa Valley as well as in Bordeaux.

Given that situation I tend to try and find a current wine which fits well in one of the best gift baskets available.  I always think that if I can get something really incredible now, that helps to make up for the fact that many of us were simply born in a poor year for wine.

It sucks, but what can you do?

I guess I’m not typical in that my story is about my regrets about not conforming. I’ve been reading tthe stories on this website and many people have said that they had a boring existence of work and no play, and that they left there normal lives behind to look for adventure. While on their adventure they ’found’ themselves, and often they discovered the ideal life for themselves on a beach somewhere or in the mountains.

When I left university in 1991 I wanted nothing to do with work. I wanted to see the world but I had an overdraft and nowhere to live other than my parents. I opted to share with friends and go on the dole. I then made quick money doing various illegal things that I’m not proud of and that I won’t detail here.

Once I had cleared my overdraft and saved up I a few pennies I bought a ticket to India. The first thing I did in India was to falsely claim my travelers checks were stolen thus doubling my money. I proceeded to travel around not just India but also South East Asia, Indonesia and China. I often found work along the way – working in bars, in hostels, teaching diving, teaching English, selling illicit substances. I even got a job crewing on a boat to Hong Kong.

Life was exciting. I loved the facty that one day I could be living in a bungalow on Koh Phangan and the next I could be sleeping in a train station in Xi’an. I had a few scrapes and near misses along the way. Until bad karma caught up with me. I got done trying to smuggle charas out of India. I wound up in an Indian prison for 1 year. When I got out I went home.

Now I have no money, a stamp in my passport that stops me entering many countries and I am struggling to find a job, any job. I have less idea what I want to do today then I did in 1991. I wish I had been more sensible, more normal.

I went to college and straight after I got an office job. I really don’t want to write about the tedious job I did in an office for nearly 20 years. That is all behind me. Needless to say I was a fairly model citizen: I put down a deposit on a house, got a mortgage and after a few years up-graded to a bigger house and a bigger mortgage. I got married and I had a kid. That was the best thing I did during that phase of my life. I paid into a pension. I paid my taxes regularly. I drove a Japanese car and took my family to holiday in Spain or Italy. I sometimes played 5-a-side for my local pub team. I got meaningless promotions and small pay rises.

And then one day. Just like the movie, I woke up and decided that I didn’t want my life anymore. That day I went into work and handed in my notice. I took my entitled paid holiday so I effectively never went back to work. The thought of doing anymore mindless typing in front of a computer was enough to make me feel suicidal. It made me feel physically sick. I had some type of mid-life crisis.

My wife was very supportive. She also did part time work that she didn’t particularly like. We talked for a week before we decided to put our house on the market. Our daughter had just entered university so we didn’t feel like we were letting her down.

It was pre-2008 and we got a handsome price for our 3 bedroom detached house. I also sold my car. I took my work suits down to Oxfam. That was a satisfying moment.

In 2006 my wife and I took a flight to Thailand. We didn’t have much of a plan. We thought we might look for work eventually but we still had plenty of money. In the end we settled in an apartment on Bang Sak beach in Khao Lak. It was there that we started taking diving classes.

Within two years both of us were dive instructors. We worked on liveaboard boats going to the Similan Islands. Recently, we have set up our own small dive school in Khao Lak with a few bungalows to rent. We have a dog and a wonderful life. Our daughter visits us every holiday. That day when I quit my office job was the most important day of my life.

’68 was a good year wasn’t it?

Unfortunately for those of us turning 50 (increasingly, frighteningly soon I might add) soon, there isn’t a lot of birth year wine left.  I wanted to give a couple of ’68 style wine gift baskets to my friends from high school, but the wine selection from back then is pretty barren right now.

The problem has a lot to do with two main factors.  First, I was born before the whole Paris tasting thing in the early 70’s where California beat France.  Before that happened, no one really bothered to store or cellar much California wine.

Secondly, ’68 was a bad, bad year for Bordeaux.  Evidently it rained all summer and harvest was among the worst on record, even sending a few notables into bankrupcy years later. Heck, I can’t find a single bottle available and an article in Wine Spectator speculated that most of the good wine from ’68 in Bordeaux was consumed and gone by the mid 1970’s.  The magazine couldn’t get a sample! 

Even with huge modifications in the way customers are performed nowadays, and the advance of whole new industrial sectors on account of technological innovations such as the web. 21st century possess remained on the whole reasonably the same since the coming of the non-public laptop or computer. Presentations need to have not be completed in flipcharts or black/white boards because laptop or computer presentations connected to electronic projectors offer you more visually produced along with rapidly recalled alternate options.

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For years I have watched parents, grandparents and their friends toiling away in the garden.  To be honest I never really understood why anyone would waste their time when they could be doing something more interesting.  Slowly though I began to appreciate a quiet glass of wine whilst watching the sun going down or the starlings circling over head.

Of course then came the children and my garden was transformed into an outdoor activity centre, goalposts were placed, bouncy castles errected and the shed filled with plastic toys and vehicles.  Needless to say this was not a time to plant expensive shrubs or cultivate borders of delicate flowers of any sort.  But it what it lacked in beauty it more than  made up with laughter at least.   

But now my garden is beginning to draw me in again.  It has become a quiet, peaceful place again, the remaining child prefering his Xbox to a mad game of croquet.  Unfortunately the garden is a bit of a mess and all my garden tools seemed to have disappeared.  The only tools I seem to have left are bright yellow and made out of plastic. 

Anyway I don’t have a huge budget so I had to minimize the cost of replacing all my tools.  I shopped around for ages for a lawnmower, there seems to be hundreds of them now.  My first instinct was to check out the hover type mowers which I used to see in the 70s and 80s – they looked a good idea but were always hopeless.  After reading a few reviews I found that the general concensus was that they were still rubbish.  In the end I managed to find a great little mower from the gardening review site – Best Lawnmower Reviews.  As for the rest I settled for a spade and my gardening friend suggested that a great multi-purpose tool was the garden hoe.  I bought one for ten bucks and that was me sorted.

I can’t say I’m going to spend as many hours gardening as my parents did, but it’s a great way to unwind after a stressful desk based job.  And of course I can now enjoy my evening glass of wine in relative peace and quiet!

Life is so different now. You leave your office and go do some groceries on the way back home. It’s so easy these days, but It was not that easy during the 1980′s. I think I came from the last generation where nothing was obvious or easy and our national port’s were standing in queues. I remember being picky about my coffee and how I can’t decide which flavor or how strong the coffee I purchased should be. I recall the moment when I was 9 and I was queuing with my mom for 2-3 hours for 100 grams of black beans. I loved that aroma of fresh melted coffee but in order for you to purchase anything you had to stand in long queues that stretched forever. For example, purchasing pencils, pens or even books could cost you a whole day of standing in front of the shop. I remember when I was 7 and I was queuing in for my mom. Every time when she wanted to buy some meat and I was going to the shop after school, there would be people already waiting outside. When she was leaving the office at 3pm she was coming to the shop where I was standing next to cash desk. In the time when everything in my country was limited people just had to survive.

I think the problem was even bigger when someone wanted to buy new furniture or wedding rings.

My mom was queuing for a week to get set or furniture to my room and I admire the piece she had in herself when she was telling me about it. It was something normal. People were just accepting the reality.  People where always thinking out of the box. I remember my aunt spending weeks to travel to Russia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary and Czech Republic. She was not going for vacation. She was taking trip to buy clothes, jewellery and basically anything that could be attractive in Poland. It was always easy to make a fast profit. She would sell gold to the goldsmith or to friends who wanted to get married.  I remember my first earing in the shape of gold butterflies that were hanging on my ears since I was 3.

Well I could write far more abut the 1980′s in Poland. This is a just small reflection I had while doing my groceries. I really appreciate what I have now and the fact that life is much easier.

Born in <1975>

I turned 37 on the 12^th of January and made no plans to celebrate being a year older aside from turning off my mobile phone and taking a hot bubble bath. That’s where I was when the messenger arrived. Wrapped in a towel, water slithering down my back, a puddle forming below my toes, I stood at the front door and signed for the package. There was no card, just a small black box that looked a hundred years old. Inside were two rings – both hand-hammered silver bands, tarnished, almost black with age. I was wet and cold, but the shiver that ran through me wasn’t due to either one.

It was 1983. I was eight, he was eleven. I had lived in Grenada for two years, he had lived on the Caribbean island all his life, but he said the only ones that had mattered were the two we’d spent together, swimming, sunbathing, chasing sand crabs and lizards, collecting seashells, sharing bits of conch meat with lemon and salt, sucking on coconut popsicles and repairing our small wooden canoe. Every day after school we’d worked hard, filling holes, scrubbing, sanding, painting, and finally testing it on the sea. That’s where he held my hand for the first time, and where one sunny afternoon he asked me to marry him…someday…. When? He’d have to make his fortune first and that would probably take until he was forty, at least that’s what he said. I said that would make me terribly old because when he turned 40 I’d be…. 37. He kissed my cheek and asked me to wait. I hadn’t replied. A few days later we met on the beach to collect shells to decorate our canoe, but he hadn’t brought a bag for shells just a small black box. Inside were two hand-hammered silver promise rings. He said he’d traded them for work sanding a canoe. I said it was all for nothing because I wasn’t allowed to wear jewelry. It wasn’t for nothing, he said. We could hide them in our canoe and wear when them when we were together. But we weren’t near our canoe or wearing our promise rings when the island was invaded on the 25^th of October. We suddenly found ourselves in opposite worlds. My family and I were evacuated. He remained and I never saw him again.

I stood there, still dripping, wrapped in my bath towel. The messenger had gone and I was alone, running my fingers over the tarnished silver promise rings. That’s when I noticed they were engraved. Inside each band was a roughly scratched date – January 12, 2012. Beside the date in one ring was the number 40. The other ring had a 37.

As a child of the 80s — I was born in 1981 — divorce is something that I am all too familiar with. Divorce rates really seemed to pick up steam in the 80s, and my parents, unfortunately, took that path when their marriage was too tough to handle.

One of my memories from childhood was being at grade school with my step-mother (my dad remarried about two years after my parents divorced), trying to pick up my report card for the year, only to have my step-mother denied access because she wasn’t my biological mother. It was an awkward situation, and I remember crying in the car on the way home because it all seemed so foreign.

My parents and step-mother ended up having to fill out a power of attorney to allow my step-mother access to my report card. She never had a problem after that, but the whole situation was very jarring as a young child.

Now that I’m older, I appreciate what I went through and feel like it shaped who I am today. Still though, it was a hard situation to go through as a child.

In 1991, the internet became truly global in its scope and use.  It became a highway of information that cut a wide swath around the world and never left it the same as it was before.  Word-of-mouth marketing and other forms of marketing strategy have never been so common.  But though it was a virtual highway, the effects it brought about were very real. Manufacturing jobs were decimated as new markets catering to services rather than manufacturing began to emerge.  Big numbers of workers in the automobile manufacturing and other similar industries were either laid off or given drastically reduced working hours. On the other hand, service-oriented workers such as teachers and nurses greatly increased in number. Workers who worked with their minds rather than with their muscles began to have a distinct advantage in the labor market.  Businesses that did not adopt their strategy to this new reality were wiped out altogether.

But amidst all the destruction and mayhem being wreaked upon the corporate world, there was light at the end of the tunnel.  It only took people who knew how to think out of the box to take advantage of the new and great business opportunities that were unfolding right before their very eyes. In the multi-billion dollar field of advertising, the visionary and precocious ones were already having a headstart in their shift from print and television media to the exploding digital media that would turn social media network creators from virtual unknowns to billionaire celebrities. For the classic idea of requiring a big amount of capital to impact big industry has finally been laid to rest.  For how can you explain a group of newly-graduated yuppies with very little capital turning out to be moguls in their own field in the short span of less than a decade?

It is easy to see from what has transpired in the 1990’s that business strategy development is essential to the survival and growth of a business. A time characterized by deep, fundamental and earth-shaking changes must be responded to with corresponding creative and forward-looking business strategies.