Had our final meeting with the bank and things seem OK. I guess we can do no more than wait for the wheels to turn now. A scary amount of money, but we are confident that the sums add up and it’s ‘affordable’ – in the loosest of terms!
As an aside, but related to the objectives of our project, I had a discussion at work yesterday relating to the blast injuries being taken by servicemen in Afghanistan. The gist of it was that we’d at least have a great Paralympic team come the 2012 Olympiad. Partly this view was driven by the recent BBC documentary ‘Wounded’ featuring a couple of soldiers, now finding themselves in recovery after multiple amputations.
No doubt that a fighting spirit correlates with positive outcomes in adverse and novel situations, but it did get me thinking what did our discussion say about our views on those of us that have never had the experience of being fully able?
Maybe I’m being oversensitive or perhaps PC – but was there an inference that such fighting spirit is only evident following trauma? [Traumatic disability in this case] Do people only achieve if they have lost something?
It doesn’t fit does it? Dame Tanni Grey-Thomson anyone? She seems to have managed to achieve sporting success without the benefit of an insight into abled body-ness (if there is such a word). For that matter and rather obviously, Joe and Joanna Public also are known to do well on occasions too – with no disability whatsoever!
So what does motivate us? Is it what we have lost or is it what we might gain? The truth is both do. We fear and move away from loss and aspire and move towards the rewarding. But I suspect it is easier to attribute success to a discernible event (and there can’t be too many things more ‘obvious’ than having your legs blown off by an improvised explosive device). At the other end of the scale we attribute success to people ‘landing a plum job’ or maybe ‘winning the lottery’. This is a shame as it suggests that we might have a behaviour tendency to sit idly by and wait for our own crisis or random good fortune before looking to do something ‘exceptional’.
Think what our potential could be if we avoid this trap.
The difference between people that ‘do’ and people that ‘do not’ bears a sharp correlation with people that succeed and people that ‘just’ live. (At the risk of sounding like an awful self help book – we make our own luck.)
Maybe it’s just that I need to justify to myself, that we are borrowing more than our first house cost us in order to realise our ambition…. Still it’s a point worth pondering n’est pas?
OEC have also emailed to say they are expecting a full order book. We’ll need to move pretty fast if we are to avoid a greatly extended lead time (backed with a £2k deposit), but we are hostage to getting approval from the bank. We can wait for sure as the trip is still years off, but VAT returns to 17.5% in Jan 2010.
Here’s hoping the next posts include firm progress once funding is tangibly in our hands!
Hopefully within the next month or so….